UNITED STATES—As Zorba resumed his story, he wished he could sharpen a few details. His itch to know why they were in the year 100 Twelvetrees would have to wait. The essential thing was to move on boldly with what sketchy hunches he had. The pencil is always in love with the sharp point, but often enough the blunt point is good enough to finish the job. frightened
The family’s hopes frightened him; they craved a savior for this man so far gone. To Zorba’s trained eye he knew that the pallor and round belly signified a damaged liver struggling under a bad load of toxins, being unable to rid the body of it. The strict code of primitive technologies forbade a machine to cleanse the blood.
“It’s so simple, really—the DNA code.” There was no device here in the wildly rustic “up here” where all the toxins and waste that envenomed the blood, this slow killer could be cleansed and death could be cheated for quite a long time, especially if one had deep pockets. In the Underground Cities, a sick puppy could go on quite forever and the family, the loved ones could face the issue head-on and pull the plug, but here, in the technologically regulated province, where all but basic technology was zealously outlawed, there was no plug to pull. Here in this plain farmhouse was The Leader, dead, dyed, dying.
Nothing more to be done than revel the truth, such as Detective Zorba now on administrative leave for dereliction of duty, such as he could patch together and hope, damn well, that his voice did not reflect that he knew his life was on the line. He knew it better than anyone else, under the artificial sun of the the Underground Cities, which he yearned to get back to.
Zorba spoke:
“It was during the ‘special period’ when people were subject to home confinement. They thought it would last a couple months. It lasted much more than that and it became socially sanctioned to pass a person on the street without saying a thing, which is what we do in the Underground Cities. They had the onus of saving their skin, as they were all potential carriers of the virus, and Elam, the brother of Ethan. . .”
His grandmother told him tales of a cousin who in his deathbed flagellated himself for, leaving the house once in the 18 months to order French fries. Grandma’s lesson:
Be careful of what you do, but more careful about what you choose to believe about what you do,” she told young Zorba on her knees.
Zorba repeated, “and Elam, the brother of Ethan. . .”
Eyelids twitched in the bed-bound bulbous figure in equinox between life and the cessation of life, yielding to a septic tide rising in this rotting entrails and hid by iridescent brocade.
Zorba went on:
“On this side-street called Wilcox, now submerged by lakes, Elam Sterne, the deaf brother placed into a foster home was bludgeoned by a heavy tool. Likely a hammer, to judge by the clean round hole in the temporal lobe, and the forensics show the angle was brought down by someone of roughly the same height, and leaving a nice hole the size of one of your Twelvetree coins.
“The motive wasn’t robbery. Nothing was stolen, possibly a case of mistaken identity. At the time there was extensive security camera footage, that could tell us more, but if these images vanished with the Vegan War and the unleashing of E-bombs that eradicated all videotape. The killer saw something so traumatic that is triggered cognitive dissonance. He blotted it out of his mind or thought he was dreaming. What they saw before fleeing the crime was that the victim of the hammer-blow was someone identical to himself. Identical to the twin brother given up for adoption that the killer had no idea existed.
There was a tremor in the bulky body on the bed; the eyes rolled back, exposing a bloodshot vacancy. The Twelvetree clan scrambled to bring wine to his pallid lips.
To be continued…
Graydon Miller is the author of “Later Bloomer: Tales of Darkest Hollywood,” https://amzn.to/2Ljky3v.
