Gregor – Edward Morris

Gregor

by Edward Morris

Tape hiss, room tone, coughing and shifting of chairs. A woman speaks:

Take your hand off me, flatfoot, or I know where to twist.

Thank you.

I did it, you cold policemen, with your cold noses and the cold clinging to your coats like the cigarette smoke clings to your fingers, your breath.

I killed the man I love, the greatest physicist our nation ever produced. The man who almost invented the teleportation of physical matter.

Yes, what you found was my husband. I stove his head in with a poker, and I’d do it again. I did it for him. He asked me to, don’t you understand that, he… He could talk, for just a moment. At the last, he begged for my help. He—

State my name again, for the record? Helen Patricia Samsa. Any statements of my own?

Yes. The hardest thing is not caring. You have to walk away, and wipe your shoes, and hold your head up high, and know that you will, gentlemen, you will one day feel better, one day, one day, I—

But then again, maybe it’s time to get rid of old things….

Are we all merely a collection of particulate matter, or is the Soul made of information, knowledge? I have no idea. My husband tried to answer this so many times and was shouted down, down, down by the scientific community.

Before his lucky break that ended so badly, they rode him out of town on the same rail they did Tesla, for suggesting that Science could advance to the point where it looked like Magic. The physicists of our time who ride the edge as far as Safety…or their patrons.. will allow them., Einstein and Planck and De Broglie and all the rest of that ivy-covered cigar-smoking old boys’ club, they…

I do go on. I see the reels of your recorder turning, Inspector. I am a new widow, and can no longer ponder particle physics now that the blood is gone, all washed off, photographed and hosed away, then bleached, then swept out with a broom and the broom then burned in an incinerator.

Inspector, can you please tell your two jack-booted thugs to leave the room if they can’t stop admiring my bosom from afar? I have many eyes, you see, and some of them come out on stalks. Ha! If you can’t laugh at…

There I go.  Do you… do you have a clean handkerchief? I see I don’t. I…

All right. Yes, I had started telling you, hadn’t I? Slow down and begin at the beginning?  Let me try.

#

What. Is. That?

Yes, Inspector, where I’m looking. Sitting on the baseboard, just sitting there with its feelers up, moving, like it was taking down every word I said, a little six-legged…

Oh. Just a dust-bunny. My apologies. Did you know that a cockroach can live for several days without its head? I read they can even mate for two or three…

I’m all right. I’m really all right. I will be. It will be.

All right.  Before you peril my soul in murderess’ role, can I trouble you for a smoke?

It’s a gentleman you are, Inspector. God above, it’s been five years since I had one. My husband said I was harder to work with, after I quit the habit for my health.  That damned brother of his, the whole family… Oh, they all smoke like chimney-tops. Hard to be around without wanting one.

Yes, that brother of his. Frank, with all his damned steel mills and his bankbook he always drags out like his “mad scientist” brother could never afford a meal or a cup of coffee.

I killed Frank’s brother. I killed my husband.  I know they don’t hang women around here, but with or without the coffin-nails, my lungs have never been all that reliable. Any time spent in a cold, mouldy prison would probably mean that I join my poor love in that great big laboratory in the hereafter, where there are no questions, only answers, and for God’s sake, no…

Well, no bugs.

I’m all right.  Bear with me for a moment.

#

We’d gone for a long drive outside of the city, with two bottles of wine and some cold roast chicken in a hamper, a loaf of bread, some potato-salad. And a blanket.

That was the part that gets  me. We never got to use that blanket for anything but half the meal and maybe a little wine, before he…

Well, we were watching the stars, and my poor twinkly-eyed elf smirked his sad smirk, and blinked, and pointed to one that fell.

“Make a wish,” he whispered. He hardly ever spoke above a whisper, but that time was different.I wished…

Oh, God, the wine had already gone to my head, and I wished him, I wished my husband success at his research, I…

I saw the star keep falling. They don’t, usually.

I read in the science journals that planet Earth is bombarded by aerolites each and every day, and that most of them burn up before they even enter the lower atmosphere. This one kept coming down, and down, burning like no mineral or metal salt I have ever seen produce firework colors in a pair of tongs above a Bunsen burner. I got up and began to fold up the blanket. He was already running back to the car.

I cried a little bit, Inspector, and I’m not ashamed. He’d been… he works all the time, like a dog, and we hadn’t gotten to spend any time together for so long…

Inspector, he got, like a child, when he was having an idea. Everything was a vision, he… I might as well have tried to stop a thunderstorm. My husband had to go and see where the meteorite landed.

Oh, what a scientist he was. He’d done no more than pull off the road than he was already out of the car with a thermometer in his hand from the first-aid kit in the glovebox. I saw him jam that thermometer into the smoking rock at the bottom of the small crater; he had to lie flat and lean into it to reach. I screamed a thousand warnings, but they might as well have been in English.

The metal was of no like we had ever seen, and cooled quickly following impact. We procured a bucket of water from the service station two miles away, (with a sufficient crossing of palms with silver for the attendant to remain well-paid at his midnight studies of the cheap pulp magazines).

My husband melted several ounces of that shimmering black rock down at a forge not far from here, at the edge of a vast hay-field on the end of a long dirt cow-road. (He didn’t dare ask Frank to let him in down at the mill. “Not for this,” were his final words on that particular matter.)

The big, gruff, adorable old smitty, a Mr. Vuckcevich, said he was used to shoeing horses for farmers, and took my husband’s biergeld with gratitude and gravity.

Vuckcevich melted down the metal, a bandanna tied around his mustached, bespectacled face. The shiny rock chips smoked again, and grew molten orange. The smell was bitter, rather like iron filings and cinnamon, and left a taste in the throat much akin to the smoke from tinner’s flux.

In and out of this my husband hopped and danced, unearthing four or five square ingot-molds from a shelf somewhere in the cluttered shop. “The damned chemists and bean-counters can place it wherever they wish on the Periodic Table,” he groused grandly, storking around with those poor big ears out like wings , “I want to see what it does…”

The smitty knew his business, and soon began to pour.

What? No, I haven’t been sick at all, other than… No, nothing from the metal. I was just down to the doctor five days ago.

Well, he said I wasn’t pregnant, and I needed more rest. Thank you so much for asking.

No, my husband and that Vuckcevich never displayed any signs of toxicity that I am aware of, Inspector, no. My husband used himself as a kind of… human laboratory-rat, if  you will,  to the end, to determine that, and other things,  to be sure, but…

To make a long story short, much too late, he determined that the metal reacted to heat in completely unremarkable ways, but when placed in contact with electricity, and X-rays, it…

Well, here’s the part where the old boys’ club has a hard time explaining the process, and my husband, too. He said that the metal did things to light, when it was charged with certain radiation.

I don’t quite follow this even now. This is far out of my field. I am a biologist, not Madam Curie. But my husband claimed that subatomic particles could be moved from one place to the other on a beam of light, and that he had photographic proof through his own electron microscope that larger particles could do the same, under these conditions, using that new metal, larger, larger, as long as the power source was likewise scaled up.

As I said, my husband stubbornly persisted in acting as his own laboratory rat, until the terrible end that brought me here. The problem was, without me around to anchor him all the time, he… he slipped up, he missed something, he…

He kept his notes locked away. He didn’t want me involved. He said he didn’t want me hurt.  But I’m… I was… his assistant! I made his breakfasts every morning, typed out his manuscripts, mailed his letters. I saw the component parts assembled.

I saw, in the end, what he did, out in the back garden: The two little work-stations, both powered by heavy electrical cables that plugged into the high-voltage sockets in the cellar.

I saw those cathode tubes pointed at the ingots, and each apparatus shoved into either of those dreadful “Orgone Boxes” he just had to spend our hard-earned money to build, years ago. I knew better than to ask, or walk into the line of fire in any way. Not while he was working.

I just watched, out of sight, waiting for my wish to come true. And in the end, as Werner Heisenberg’s dire Principle states, the observer…changed… the experiment?

But I am not to blame. Surely not.

From my unseen bit of shadow at the corner of the yard, I saw the twinkling hole in the air open above the first butter-churn-sized glass jar in the left Orgone Box. The Orgone Box on the left was the open one, when the single house-fly crossed its axis six inches above its by-now-quite-molten tin roof.

I saw my husband leaping up and down like a wild ape, screaming eureka at the top of his voice. I quickly made my exit. I understood very little.

That night, when dusting the basement part of his laboratory, I found the same housefly floating in formaldehyde. A leaf of grass protruded from one wing, some fundamental bonding present between the plant and insect tissue that I couldn’t grasp. And a piece of gravel from the driveway was growing from its head. Simply growing.

From its head.

#

My husband barely ate for a week, took amphetamines from the chemist’s, and spoke to me in monosyllables. Rather than being startled by my lack of surprise, he retreated completely into the world of pure, applied science, the rest of his brain disconnecting, keeping only a skeleton staff in that cage of bone to ensure his own basic survival.

All that was last week. This week, he apparently did something even more foolhardy,with tragic consequences.  It would almost have been better had he blown his very brains out, or blown up his heart with those pills of his.

Either way, I’ve had to clean up one hell of a mess, Inspector, if you’ll pardon my language.  As Goethe tells us, some things created in the alchemist’s laboratory may not be fit to exist outside of it.

I saw, I saw… and I see the disintegration of all I have, all I own, all I am. I tried all that was humanly possible, and inhumanly possible. There isn’t a jury in the world that would convict me. No one could think of living with such endless torment, on his end or my own. There would be no other way to fix it. Not now, not ever.

He was yelling eureka quite a bit more, at the end. I saw by his notes, (following with my finger on the paper) that he’d found a way to deepen and enlarge the field so that a human-sized stick figure might, in theory, open the closed door of the other Orgone Box like Pandora slipping into a magician’s disappearing-cabinet, and pop out in the other box.

But when you wish on a star when the stars are wrong, you will wish again that you were sawn in half.

I stove in my husband’s head, Inspector, oh, God, oh, God, that was really him, underneath! If you get your men back there and look, you can tell, I saw, I can show you… The exoskeletal structure was perfect, but the human skeleton hadn’t quite… changed… it…

Inspector, when I heard the explosion I ran downstairs. I smelled smoke. I was going to break the machine with that fireplace-poker, break the circuit somehow, if I could, but it was too late.

I saw what my husband had become. He got out seven words, while he still could.

“WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME? HELP ME!”

Help me, Inspector. I am hot from shame and sorrow. I still see you looking confused. Do you not take my meaning? Have you not, all along?

The stupid thing my husband did, the only thing I hold against him in death… was bringing the machine inside the laboratory, then placing it close to the ground so that nothing might fly in—

Oh, God, Inspector, I used to have to remind my husband to eat, to change his socks, to get out the door to work by seven o’clock.

He’s… He forgets things, sometimes, when he’s working. I said before, when he has a vision he’s like a child, or was, he…

But how could he forget that? God damn it, Inspector, how could he not account for an environmental variable on his own street? He was first of all our neighbors to talk to the Health Inspector about that horrid restaurant at the end of our block.

How could he not remember that we’d had the exterminators around our own home five times, or the way the two spinsters next door to us whined and carried on and complained…

About their basements being full of cockroaches.

#

You’re not speaking. I assume I’ll spend the night in one of those holding cells. I don’t know what the photographs are in that folder upon which you keep drumming your fingers. May I phone up my sister, to come bring me a few things?

What? I am free to … What?  Oh, no, no, of course I’ll spend the night in a hotel. But…

Yes, I’ll come back to the house with you, whatever you ask. Yes, I can do it. I…

Oh, how did you know there was more I hadn’t told?  Inspector?

Oh. Oh. To be sure. I had… I had no idea that what I had done could even be called…

Self-defense?  Well, yes, after he lost his words, he… he went up the wall, and then came at me, hissing, he…

Inspector, I didn’t… even mention that part! I was trying to respect my dear dead love’s memory! How on Earth did you ever deduce that I was…

Oh. Right. I suppose that is how you attained your present position. God bless you for not judging me. No, I won’t leave town. My psychiatrist is local. For that, I’ve never been more grateful.

#

For Franz Kafka, James Clavell and Pete Lee.

 

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Edward Morris bio:
I am a 2005 British Science Fiction Association Award nominee, also nominated for the 2009 Rhysling Award. I’m a veteran guest author at Orycon and the H.P.Lovecraft Film Festival, with over 70 short story sales and 6 ebook sales worldwide. Latest sales include my four-book series BLACKGUARD to Wildside Press; “Lotophagi” to Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year 2, and THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN, my seminal cross-genre alternate history epic 22 years in the making, to Mercury Retrograde Press.

© 2010 All rights reserved Edward Morris

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