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Metastasis

by Dan Simmons

Introduction

It's odd to think that within the walls of concentration camps such as Auschwitz and

even in camps such as Treblinka and Sobibor where extermination of human be-ings

was the only official activity, wives of the comman-dants kept gardens, children of

the high-ranking German officers attended classes and competed at sports,

musi-cians played Mozart and Bach and Mahler at dinner par-ties, wives worried

about their figures while their husbands checked for receding hairlines ... all the banal

preoccupations which constitute the human condition that we share today.

While all around them, humans were being starved and beaten and gassed and fed to

the ovens. The ash that had been human flesh an hour before now lightly dusted the

roses in the gardens. Barbed wire separated the boys' soccer fields from the killing

fields. The music of Mozart carried to the barracks where former musicians and

com-posers and conductors lay shivering with the other human skeletons there.

In the commandant's comfortable home, the adminis-trator checked his hairline in the

mirror and the adminis-trator's wife looked in her mirror, pirouetted, pouted, and

decided that she would have one less torte for dessert that night.

Did the mirrors reflect human beings?

Of course they did. People can adapt to almost any-thing.

During the days of the Black Death in the 13th Century, when entire villages were

wiped out, when the death carts rumbled through the streets at night with the cry

"Bring out your dead!" until there was no one left to bury them, there was much

preoccupation with the macabre, many flirtations with death—skull-masked revelers

danced nightly in the burial catacombs of Paris—but overall, the small wheel of daily

life creaked along as usual.

Are we doing the same today?

I always flinch when I hear someone use the word decimate to mean "wipe out," as

in, "The Sioux deci-mated Custer's men."

The word actually comes from the Latin and the action it implies from the Romans.

When someone in an occu-pied province defied the Roman governor or killed a

Ro-man soldier, the Romans would hold a lottery and kill every tenth person. (

Decimate as in Decimat(us) , past par-ticiple of decimare .)

The Jews weren't decimated in Poland and Europe; they were almost wiped out.

The people of 13th Century Europe weren't decimat-ed; a fourth to half of the entire

population was wiped out. And the plague returned—again and again. The people

could not see the plague bacillus so in a sense it did not exist for them. They saw

only the results piled high in the death carts each night, staring eyes and exposed

teeth illu-minated by the light of torches.

We're not being decimated by cancer in the latter part of the 20th Century—the odds

are worse than that. The lottery calls one in six. Or perhaps it's already one in five.

(It's been getting worse for a long time.)

Meanwhile, we grow our gardens, play our games, lis-ten to our music, and look in

our mirrors.

We just try not to see too much.

* * *

On the day Louis Steig received a call from his sister saying that their mother had

collapsed and been admitted to a Denver hospital with a diagnosis of cancer, he

promptly jumped into his Camaro, headed for Denver at high speed, hit a patch of

black ice on the Boulder Turn-pike, flipped his car seven times, and ended up in a

coma from a fractured skull and a severe concussion. He was unconscious for nine

days. When he awoke he was told that a minute sliver of bone had actually

penetrated the left frontal lobe of his brain. He remained hospitalized for eighteen

more days—not even in the same hospital as his mother—and when he left it was

with a headache worse than anything he had ever imagined, blurred vision, word

from the doctors that there was a serious chance that some brain damage had been

suffered, and news from his sister that their mother's cancer was terminal and in its

final stages.

The worst had not yet begun.

It was three more days before Louis was able to visit his mother. His headaches

remained and his vision re-tained a slightly blurred quality—as with a television

channel poorly tuned—but the bouts of blinding pain and uncontrolled vomiting had

passed. His sister Lee drove and his fiancee Debbie accompanied him on the twenty

mile ride from Boulder to Denver General Hospital.

"She sleeps most of the time but it's mostly the drugs," said Lee. "They keep her

heavily sedated. She probably won't recognize you even if she is awake."

"I understand," said Louis.

"The doctors say that she must have felt the lump ... understood what the pain meant

... for at least a year. If she had only ... It would have meant losing her breast even

then, probably both of them, but they might have been able to..." Lee took a deep

breath. "I was with her all morning. I just can't ... can't go back up there again today,

Louis. I hope you understand."

"Yes," said Louis.

"Do you want me to go in with you?" asked Debbie.

"No," said Louis.

Louis sat holding his mother's hand for almost an hour. It seemed to him that the

sleeping woman on the bed was a stranger. Even through the slight blurring of his

sight, he knew that she looked twenty years older than the person he had known; her

skin was gray and sallow, her hands were heavily veined and bruised from IVs, her

arms lacked any muscle tone, and her body under the hospital gown looked

shrunken and concave. A bad smell sur-rounded her. Louis stayed thirty minutes

beyond the end of visiting hours and left only when his headaches threatened to

return in full force. His mother remained asleep. Louis squeezed the rough hand,

kissed her on the forehead, and rose to go.

He was almost out of the room when he glanced at the mirror and saw movement.

His mother continued to sleep but someone was sitting in the chair Louis had just

va-cated. He wheeled around.

The chair was empty.

Louis's headache flared like the thrust of a heated wire behind his left eye. He turned

back to the mirror, moving his head slowly so as not to exacerbate the pain and

ver-tigo. The image in the mirror was more clear than his vi-sion had been for days.

Something was sitting in the chair he had just vacated.

Louis blinked and moved closer to the wall mirror, squinting slightly to resolve the

image. The figure on the chair was somewhat misty, slightly diffuse against a more

focused background, but there was no denying the reality and solidity of it. At first

Louis thought it was a child—the form was small and frail, the size of an emaciated

ten-year-old—but then he leaned closer to the mirror, squinted through the haze of

his headache, and all thoughts of chil-dren fled.

The small figure leaning over his mother had a large, shaven head perched on a thin

neck and even thinner body. Its skin was white—not flesh white but paper white,

fish-belly white—and the arms were skin and tendon wrapped tightly around long

bone. The hands were pale and enor-mous, fingers at least six inches long, and as

Louis watched they unfolded and hovered over his mother's bed-clothes. As Louis

squinted he realized that the figure's head was not shaven but simply hairless—he

could see veins through the translucent flesh—and the skull was dis-turbingly broad,

brachycephalic, and so out of proportion with the body that the sight of it made him

think of pho-tographs of embryos and fetuses. As if in response to this thought, the

thing's head began to oscillate slowly as if the long, thin neck could no longer

support its weight. Louis thought of a snake closing on its prey.

Louis could do nothing but stare at the image of pale flesh, sharp bone and

bruise-colored shadows. He thought fleetingly of concentration camp inmates

shuffling to the wire, of week-dead corpses floating to the surface like in-flatable

things made of rotted white rubber. This was worse.

It had no ears. A rimmed, ragged hole with reddened flanges of flesh opened directly

into the misshapen skull. The eyes were bruised holes, sunken blue-black sockets in

which someone had set two yellowed marbles as a joke. There were no eyelids. The

eyes were obviously blind, clouded with yellow cataracts so thick that Louis could

see layers of striated mucus. Yet they darted to and fro pur-posefully, a predator's

darting, lurking glare, as the great head moved closer to his mother's sleeping form.

In its own way, Louis realized, the thing could see.

Louis whirled around, opened his mouth to shout, took two steps toward the bed

and the suddenly empty chair, stopped with fists clenched, mouth still straining with

his silent scream, and turned back to the mirror.

The thing had no mouth as such, no lips, but under the long, thin nose the bones of

cheeks and jaw seemed to flow forward under white flesh to form a funnel, a long

ta-pered snout of muscle and cartilage which ended in a per-fectly round opening

that pulsed slightly as pale-pink sphincter muscles around the inner rim expanded

and con-tracted with the creature's breath or pulse. Louis staggered and grasped the

back of an empty chair, closing his eyes, weak with waves of headache pain and

sudden nausea. He was sure that nothing could be more obscene than what he had

just seen.

Louis opened his eyes and realized that he was wrong.

The thing had slowly, almost lovingly, pulled down the thin blanket and topsheet

which covered Louis's mother. Now it lowered its misshapen head over his mother's

chest until the opening of that obscene proboscis was scant inches away from the

faded blue-flower print of her hos-pital gown. Something appeared in the

flesh-rimmed open-ing, something gray-green, segmented, and moist. Small, fleshy

antennae tested the air. The great, white head bent lower, cartilage and muscle

contracted, and a five-inch slug was slowly extruded, wiggling slightly as it hung

above Louis's mother.

Louis threw his head back in a scream that finally could be heard, tried to turn, tried

to remove his hands from their deathgrip on the back of the empty chair, tried to

look away from the mirror. And could not.

Under the slug's polyps of antennae was a face that was all mouth, the feeding orifice

of some deep-sea para-site. It pulsed as the moist slug fell softly onto his moth-er's

chest, coiled, writhed, and burrowed quickly away from the light. Into his mother.

The thing left no mark, no trail, not even a hole in the hospital gown. Louis could see

the slightest ripple of flesh as the slug disappeared under the pale flesh of his

mother's chest.

The white head of the child-thing pulled back, the yel-low eyes stared directly at

Louis through the mirror, and then the face lowered to his mother's flesh again. A

sec-ond slug appeared, dropped, burrowed. A third.

Louis screamed again, found freedom from paralysis, turned, ran to the bed and the

apparently empty chair, thrashed the air, kicked the chair into a distant corner, and

ripped the sheet and blanket and gown away from his mother.

Two nurses and an attendant came running as they heard Louis's screams. They

burst into the room to find him crouched over his mother's naked form, his nails

clawing at her scarred and shrunken chest where the sur-geons had recently removed

both breasts. After a moment of shocked immobility, one nurse and the attendant

seized and held Louis while the other nurse filled a syringe with a strong tranquilizer.

But before she could administer it, Louis looked in the mirror, pointed to a space

near the op-posite side of the bed, screamed a final time, and fainted.

"It's perfectly natural," said Lee the next day after their second trip to the Boulder

Clinic. "A perfectly under-standable reaction."

"Yes," said Louis. He stood in his pajamas and watched her fold back the top sheet

on his bed.

"Dr. Kirby says that injuries to that part of the brain can cause strange emotional

reactions," said Debbie from her place by the window. "Sort of like whatshisname ...

Reagan's press secretary who was shot years ago, only temporary, of course."

"Yeah," said Louis, lying back, settling his head into the tall stack of pillows. There

was a mirror on the wall opposite. His gaze never left it.

"Mom was awake for a while this morning," said Lee. " Really awake. I told her

you'd been in to see her. She doesn't ... doesn't remember your visit, of course. She

wants to see you."

"Maybe tomorrow," said Louis. The mirror showed the reversed images of the three

of them. Just the three of them. Sunlight fell in a yellow band across Debbie's red

hair and Lee's arm. The pillowcases behind Louis's head were very white.

"Tomorrow," agreed Lee. "Or maybe the day after. Right now you need to take

some of the medication Dr. Kirby gave you and get some sleep. We can go visit

Mom together when you feel better."

"Tomorrow," said Louis, and he closed his eyes.

He stayed in bed for six days, rising only to go to the bathroom or to change

channels on his portable TV. The headaches were constant but manageable. He saw

nothing unusual in the mirror. On the seventh day he rose about ten A.M., showered

slowly, dressed in his camel slacks, white shirt, and blue blazer, and was prepared to

tell Lee that he was ready to visit the hospital when his sister came into the room

red-eyed.

"They just called," she said. "Mother died about twenty minutes ago."

Dan Simmons - Metastasis.pdf

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