Liv felt neither the chair at her back nor the floor at her feet. Stupor slopped over her like thick paste, slowing the race of questions. Several managed to crawl across her brain like wounded animals, but only one made it all the way: Had what she and Doug done been worse than she’d even imagined?
“Long as you’re sitting down with your mouth shut,” Carbajal said, “let me tell you a story. It’s a story I tried to file four years ago before some very persuasive people made sure no one printed a word. Some shithole Iowa newspaper, you think they’ve got the stones to fight that kind of pressure? Fuck no, not when there’s high school football to write about. You’d know this story already if you read the forums.”
Liv inched her fingertips across the tabletop. Chipped, scratched, but real. This was all real, every bit of it was happening.
“They teach you about Anatoli Bugorski in school? Of course they don’t. Our kiddies shouldn’t dream about anything but sugarplum fairies. Anatoli Bugorski was a Russian researcher who got an accidental proton beam to the noggin in 1978. Five hundred rads is enough to kill you dead, and this guy took three hundred thousand. Dead meat, right? Except the guy doesn’t die. His face puffs up and he has the odd seizure, but he’s alive. He’s still alive today. Now there’s no more Soviet Union. The gulags are empty. The guy is talking. He says there’s others like him, a whole platoon of proton warriors. ‘I am being tested,’ he said. ‘The human capacity for survival is being tested.’”
“This is…” Liv heard her own voice as if through a wall. “Some kind of test?”
“You didn’t find your way to shithole number 302 without putting in some miles on the World Wide Web. You ever come across something called the Biatalik Program?”
If anyone had followed the wild forum postings of Mr. Brown, it would have been Doug. Yet this particular detail, this single one, was Liv’s to claim. It was Carbajal’s pronunciation, she thought, that subtle trace of a Spanish accent, the strokelike slowness of his speech, that made her recognize it, and instantly. She had heard of the Biatalik Program, though she hadn’t known it at the time. It was her second crucial misunderstanding; Liv began to wonder if her brain, in self-preservation, had fought all truths from the beginning.
Biatalik Program, Bee-ah-tall-lick Pro-gram. Or was it, misheard under radio tunes and party chatter, Be the tallest you can?
Major Dawkins had spoken these words in confidence to Lee Fleming at the major’s last birthday cookout. The memory was vivid, as are all memories of crying parents: her father’s face against the major’s Hawaiian shirt, his skinny back convulsing, while Liv, hunting for a reason to hope, had instilled the major’s gibberish phrase with false inspiration. The instinct of a little girl, she thought, the very thing Carbajal kept calling her.
“Major Dawkins,” she whispered.
“Good girl,” Carbajal said. “He was part of it. Think nuclear missile silos. Where does the government hide those? Bumfuck, North Dakota. Nowheresville, Missouri. Motherfucking Iowa. Places where no one’s looking. Biatalik Program, same deal. They needed an isolated place where they could explore the human form. Bugorski times a hundred. Chernobyl in a test tube. Don’t think America’s any better. Anytime the good old US of A tests a bomb, we chain up a few hundred beagles in the blast zone with Geiger counters clipped to their ears. Check the forums, girl. But animals only get you so far. You said your dad saw one, too?”
“And he disappeared,” she whispered.
“Biatalik was what they call ‘born classified,’ TS/SCI—top secret/sensitive compartmented information. Stuff even the Oval Office doesn’t need to know. Done without a dust mote of ethical oversight. One of the test subjects must have gotten out. Your dad saw him, and it put messed-up ideas in his head about UFOs, that’d be my guess. There would have been people plenty unhappy about what he saw. Your dad was a reporter?”
The words hurt to say: “A teacher.”
Carbajal tsked. “Even worse. People trust teachers. If he started talking—well, shit. I don’t want to say this. I’m not a cruel person. But Major Dawkins, any of those Biatalik fucks…”
“The major was a friend! He loved my dad! He wouldn’t have tried to trick him!”
“Did I say he wasn’t a friend? He probably did love him. And thought that this was his only shot to live.” Carbajal sighed. “Doesn’t matter. Your dad’s dead now. They would have killed him. Sorry, but that’s how it is.”
Liv had never believed anything different, despite Doug’s enticements that, by spreading the skinner’s blood, they might prompt some sort of exchange. No one, though, had ever pronounced his death aloud. It hit her like a slap. She saw black spots. Strangely, though, she was grateful. This stranger had planted a gravestone where the rest of them should have long ago.
“None of it was super-villain shit,” Carbajal continued. “It never starts that way. People always think they’re doing the right thing. Two doctors headed it up, Faddon and Nance. The best and brightest. I’m sure Mengele was the best and brightest, too. Please tell me your school teaches you about Mengele? This Faddon and Nance, their plan was to rid the world of degenerative disease. Who’s going to argue with that? Move the pancreas over here so it’s easier for doctors to access. Thicken a bone plate over there to protect vital organs. Accelerated eugenics, that’s all it was. I’m sure they had a nice word for it. Me, I’d call it mutation. The one you saw, what did he look like?”
He—the pronoun punctured her. A human. A man. A sick, struggling patient that, instead of helping, they’d ground through the gears of a second hell.
“Eyes,” she sputtered. “Big eyes.”
“That’s easy: superior vision.”
“A second knee. It bent back.”
“Like an animal. Land speed would be off the charts.”
“Ribs. On the outside.”
“Organic body armor. You see where this is headed?”
Liv tried to nod, but instead her head only shook, back and forth.
“Military applications,” Carbajal drawled. “They got a way of creeping in. It’s fucking Faustian. At least your teachers taught you Faust, didn’t they? Dr. Nance got cold feet. She was young, idealistic, way over her head. She sought me out. It was some Deep Throat shit. Notes left on my car. Coded phone messages. She tells me they’re using prisoners. Lifers. Giving them get-out-of-jail-free cards in exchange for a year or two of experiments. I’m not going to lie, little girl. It was exciting. I’m a pissant reporter in dull-as-a-board Iowa—right?—and here’s this nuclear bomb placed in my lap. I’m seeing Pulitzers. I’m seeing Nobel Prizes. So I went in alone. Had my camera, my recorder. God, I was stupid. So, so, so, so stupid.”
He stared at his hand for a while, as if craving the mints he held but unable to spur his arm into action. When he spoke again, his quaggy voice was further jelled by emotion.
“Sorry, but here’s the truth, and you deserve to know it. You and your friend are no better than Faddon and Nance. You really convinced yourself you were doing good by doing bad? That’s the oldest self-deception in the book. You’re going to find out what that kind of deception does to you when you get older. When it’s just you and your nightmares, night after night after night.”
Liv thought of her comfortable, rumpled bed, of holding A, and wondered if she would ever sleep so well again.
“Biatalik fell apart,” Carbajal sighed. “Of course it did. The prisoners, their bodies all rearranged—most of them weren’t going to live. And the ones who did? Those walking petri dishes? You can’t push men like that back into society. You’ll end up with a whole slew of Anatoli Bugorskis, out there telling the truth. Far as I know, the compound was sealed up, and the whole program brushed under the rug.”
“The survivors,” Liv whispered.
“What happened to them? What do you think? Who’s going to bemoan losing a few rapists and murderers? On the other hand, there’s you. You have one of them in custody. He escaped. Hid out somewhere. My god, the life he must have lived. The world—right?—it never fails to astound.”
“And the doctors?” Liv managed.
Carbajal shrugged. “A job like that, you sign away constitutional rights. Best-case scenario, they dropped into the shadows, same as me. You want to know the truth? Mr. Brown’s thousands of followers don’t mean shit. End of the day, I’m still here in my hidey-hole, no better off than those prisoners. I keep hoping one day I’ll get a private message on the forums, and it’ll be Dr. Faddon or Dr. Nance. Wouldn’t that be poetic? To find out we all ended up alone in dark little rooms?”
Liv’s eyes had fully adjusted to the murk. This only made the evidence of Carbajal’s life more oppressive. An assortment of liquor bottles to put Aggie’s old collection to shame. A garbage can overflowing with TV dinner trays. An empty aquarium lined with scum, a listless stab at companionship. A fedora, the dapper accent of the roving reporter, relegated to a dusty top shelf, never to be worn again.
“You satisfied?” Carbajal clacked the Tic Tacs to the table. “You get what you came for?”
Had she come to be ruined? That’s what she’d got. The world outside, so bright and of such depth, seemed unreal to her now, the idea of returning to it revolting. How could she go back to Bloughton and smile at her mother, joke with her friends, and stand in front of teachers, all while knowing what she’d done? The only way to convince herself she didn’t belong in this crypt was to reject all of it.
“I don’t believe it,” she said from clenched teeth. “There’s no proof.”
Carbajal’s right eyebrow rose.
“The girl wants proof? Here’s proof: Your father got one glimpse and ended up dead. Here’s proof: Faddon and Nance, verifiable geniuses, wiped off the face of the earth. Here’s proof: Fourteen months ago in Florida, Major Dawkins blew his head off with a military sidearm.”
A picture of the major popped inside Liv’s mind, his bullish forehead, his block chin, his mustache so neat and silver it might have been made of steel, followed by a second picture, all those straight, hale lines scrambled into wet, red meat. Liv gasped to refute the whole idea but was silenced by Carbajal’s shout.
“You want more proof? Do you?”
He swung upward from his chair with unforeseen agility. In the same fluid motion, he ducked his face in front of Liv while thumbing the switch on a table-side lamp. The click was soft, and the bulb lit up a wan, orange wash, but it was enough to overpower the blacked-out windows.
The left half of Carbajal’s face, shrouded in gloom until that instant, was a glossy, mealy cluster of fatty extrusions and thick patches of stiff hair. It held a roughly human shape, like a mannequin head melted and stirred with a stick, but the ballooned left eye and deep canal of the left cheek defied all rationalities of muscle and bone. The jump from the chair made Carbajal pant, and Liv watched a sheer lamina of skin pulse where the left half of his mouth should have been.
“A souvenir from my visit to their lab,” he said. “They weren’t overly thrilled by my proposed exposé.”
Liv recoiled and toppled off the side of her chair. The carpet was dank and crusty, and she bounded up, her spine striking metal shelving. Carbajal lurched to the side to match her distance, his face mercifully sliding from lamplight.
“The good looks are just the start, really,” he said. “The teeth on that side are soft as chalk. Once a week I have to flush my left ear of yellow gunk so rancid it stains the sink. I throw up half my food. You know how I said I was sterile? Truth is, I’m as impotent as a sock, not that anyone’s interested. And the lung cancer? Little girl, I haven’t smoked a day in my life.”
Liv wanted to run. She could be in the hall in seconds. But she had no place in the world until she could make things right, or as close as possible. She held her ground even as Carbajal halved the distance, capering close enough that she could again see his knobby, gouged face. He held both hands upward as if to get her opinion of a new outfit. His left hand looked like a hoof, a thick, wedge-shaped club.
“Wh-where was it?” she stammered.
“Oh, no, you can’t go there. It’s not safe. You know what might be in the soil there? In the water? Strontium 90, plutonium 239/240, all sorts of bad shit. You think I’d send a defenseless doe anywhere like that?”
She lifted the wrist compass. “It—he—he had this; it was my dad’s.”
Carbajal choked and sneered. “You think you know what’s best, do you?”
“If my dad was there, if there’s any record of him, I have to—”
Carbajal pressed in, his face inches from Liv’s. She squeezed her eyes shut but could feel the swampy billow from his half mouth and smell the spoil of his row of rotted teeth.
“This is your record. This face is your record.”
Liv forced open her eyes. His face was all that she should see; it occluded the whole world. She straightened her back and bit down, imagining her own teeth grinding to powder. She widened her eyes as much as she could and took it all in, because she’d seen worse, participated in worse, was worse. Though Major Dawkins had never actually said it, that didn’t mean it wasn’t good advice: Liv had to be the tallest she could, for just a little bit longer.
“Tell me where it was.” This time she said it gently.
The anger vibrating through Carbajal, some due to her, she knew, but much of it due to the unstoppable slippages of an unfair world, shook out through his extremities: the long, gray whips of his hair, his hand and hoof, the broken, once-proud shoulders. He seemed to sink a foot into the floor. His breathing, once slowed, sounded as if it came from a mouth that was whole. He looked at her, his huge, directionless left eye as sky blue as A’s, the other a sober, weary, saddened brown.
“If you were my daughter,” he said, “goddamn, I would be so proud.”