Karyotype of a Human

Sci-fi short story

He was eighteen, not really a boy, but not quite done with that stage in life, so one couldn't yet call him a man. He was on the verge, as seen in his tall, thinly sharp angles, in his dusty brown hair longing to be cut, clothes appealing for replacements " and, if one looked close, it was apparent that he was teetering here, because he was now becoming aware of it all. He had begun to think about things like appearance and respect and all of the other arcane concepts which came with society. 

He had always felt the teetering, but before it had been more in his mind. He had always felt like he was standing between two great things, one foot in each, but lately he had begun to feel as if they were pulling themselves apart and he was going to have to choose one very soon. That frightened him. 

His name was Jonathon Christiane. 

And now, here there was a very pretty room. Deep brown wood-paneled walls and lots of warm sun pouring in from the tall thin windows that were lined up across the room. Six windows, Jonathon counted. There are six of us here. And now he began to think more about reality " what is it? he asked again, the usual thoughts: is it a material substance? Can I feel, grab it, own it? Is it just a word? He thought of Her and wondered what she thought of reality. 

Sometimes people are very different, and this was said in a sharp, biting tone. Sometimes people just don’t understand each other. They are on different wavelengths, they are just not meant to communicate. That’s the place in things, that’s how the order goes, that’s our universe. Just as you can’t turn this - the old lady’s ugly claws grasped a thick textbook - into Jon over there " she motioned toward the sunlit window " that is how our lives are arranged. 

You are one kind of people, she continued, and you belong to your own. Do you boys understand? 

Four teens nodded. 

Jonathon, she asks. 

There was a long pause.

He looked to the others and back to her. He stared over at the windows. Silence reigned. Finally, he nods as well. 

Good, the matron said dismissively, sighing. I hope there will be no more attempts to socialize with the Others, then? 

Jonathon wondered, now, what it would be like to turn into a textbook. Could he socialize with an Other, then? 

The boys went to lunch, their laughter echoing down the hallway. Dame Dara (dumb Dara, they called her) is such a prude! they shouted and laughed, the echoes bouncing off the heavy limestone columns back into their ears, compressed air beating tight tattoos across the tympanic membranes, Jonathon lagging behind, his thoughts making the corridor stretch long and tight before him. Hurry up, Jon! they called, but he was, but the hallway was just longer and only to them was he slower, he thought, but he ran to catch up anyways. 

The hall was crowded and Jonathon went to save seats for them all while the others got in line. He found a table in the back of their half, wedged almost right into the corner, as if it wanted to escape into the wall, he thought. He sat down, let his book bag swing around and land on the chair next to him. He sat with his elbows on the table, forming a V for his head to rest on, for his heavy eyes to press into and see darkness and sometimes those colors that appear. He sighed. He wished he were somebody else. He raised his head and picked up a spoon that was lying on the table. He wished he could be that spoon. It was so wonderfully defiant in its sleek lines, its shining silver spine arching up to its rounded head, like a perfect mirror he could find the right distance from and suddenly vanish into its focal length. He gripped the spoon’s stem and wondered about its reality. It was metal and cold. 

But really, he thought, staring into the blue curve of its neck, what is a spoon? Just a twisted and shaped mass of material, and what is material? Merely atoms. And what, really, are atoms, deep down, when everything has been frozen and all their mystery stripped away? Things and space. Tiny solar systems. And what, where are atoms? Everyone, everywhere. I am atoms, he thought, I am space, the vast emptiness of the universe. Inside me. How great, how sad. 

And so is She, he thought again, she’s space too. So, we’re both space. It should be right, his mind logiced, then, they should fit. But, no, he supposed, there are different kinds of space? Her’s was the kind of space that envelops her, surrounds her universe. She was a neutron, he thought, a lovely, stable neutron. Powerful in its immobility. And the rest of us? We’re only lonely electrons, thrown on our impossible, irregular orbits through space and time, our lives nothing but spinning, turning, empty rolling ellipses through our universe, so much larger, so vacant, such small flecks of dust in infinity. Rare interactions, fleeting collisions, transitory bonds, flaring transcendence out of our determined state and then a flashing fall back to our place in the microcosmic order. That is the fate of an electron, the tiny voices in the space inside. 

He pushed his finger into the spoon, feeling his finger want to peel away as it hit the curved inside bowl that reflects back upside down distortion, layers pulling back like those flowers that only shyly open at night, and he looked at the tip wiggling wholely through on the convex outside. 

Two weeks ago he had learned how to consolidate the space inside atoms into one hole. If you asked him, this would be his answer to our question of why he was questioning reality. So far, he could only put his hand through objects, but he was rapidly improving. He didn’t think anyone else could do it, which made his relation to the world quite a bit more difficult. 

He slowly pulled his finger out of the spoon, feeling the layers push back, the flower closing up to hide and sleep. His friends sat down. The line was long, they said, a whole herd of Others stormed in after us, damn them, and we had to wait forever. Here. One of them tossed him a pouch of juice and slid a tray toward him. Sandwiches. Turkey, and potato salad on the side. The boys complained about the Others for a bit, then Dame Dara, and then talked about end of term and progression, which was two months away, and then they’d be third years, and they’d be much more respected. They deserved respect, they decided, and as third years, they’d get it. 

Jonathon had biogenetics next. He hated the class. All of the Normals had to take it, and it was basically the story of the divergent evolution of the old species of man. He sat through the lecture, where the stooped, frenetic professor (always very good ones for this class) zipped irregularly around the room, extolling the greatness brought into this world by the mutation in the “intelligence gene” (there was a real, Latinized name, but Jonathon wrote “intelligence gene” in his notes) and then a silence and the heavy awareness that only one of the beautiful twisting helixes of anyone in that room housed that mutation. 

Walking down the hallway, his elongated hallway, he saw Her through the columns, in another hallway to the side and above. He wasn’t allowed to take classes in that hallway. He stared after her, watched her slow, ideal, fluid walk and traced the slight cosine her head bobbed in the air, the soft arc he thought he saw as perhaps her head turned toward him. What was her reality? he wondered. 

He met up with his friends after classes and they all decided to sit on the soft green grass in front of the library. The library was a beautiful building, that’s what Jonathon realized as the setting sun struck it full across its slanting glass slabs, the light streaming golden down the diagonals to land in silky pink shimmers in the small, landscaped ponds on either side of it. It was the only new thing on campus, its infinite glass invisibly set in an alabaster girder. It was like a diamond. They built it fifteen years ago, just after the last election, when they had switched to all those new books. 

The friends lay back on the grass, the sun making their shadows long and thin down the slight hill they lay at the top of. They laughed and recklessly made sly remarks to the pretty female Others who walked by. Look at this one, they elbowed to each other. Jonathon sat up straight and told them to shut up. He silently watched Her approach, haloed by the backlighting of the fading sun. She slowed as his thoughts ran and his reality stretched. He squinted and smiled at Her. As she passed by, each second an infinity, the sidewalk longer than eternity, her steps leaving a streaky sine wave where her head bobbed, the sun flashed in his eyes - her body had passed and the path had curved and she wasn’t in line with it anymore. He could only catch a glint of the smile he thought she returned. 

He practiced everyday with the atoms. Soon he could pass one leg through, and then two. It felt so odd each time, like his body was being left behind, and just the thinnest middle of him was passing through. 

How did he do it? we might be asking. It’s more of a mystical magic than anything else, he might say if we asked him, it’s just a matter of looking at reality the right way and realizing who you are. Oh it’s as simple as that? we might respond sarcastically, and a startled blink, then his simple, ingenuous reply, Well, yes. 

Jonathon remembered when he was a child. He had gone to a parade. A new president had just been elected. Men around him were waving flags and women were cheering. He watched the parade, through the trousered knees and bright skirts, but all he could see were the boots, heavy, black boots, stamping down, the sidewalk humming " Jonathon thought he felt the street screaming in pain from the stomps, the way the men, large, scary, strange men, ground their soles into the pavement. And all around him people were cheering, and waving strange new flags. But he looked up at his father, his dad’s dusty face above the blue suit with the gold buttons, his best suit, and his father’s face was stony and frozen, his frown a craggy slash across it. That day, he didn’t pick his son up and put him on his shoulders. He didn’t wave a flag like the other men. He just held Jon’s hand, his hard, calloused fingers closed around Jonathon’s little hand, and he frowned. 

The top floor of the library was the best; the roof was all glass, and the tables and shelves and little private cubbies were softly puddled gold. Jon would sit in a corner, stack a wall of books around him, sit warm and content, surrounded by the smell of fresh paper and thick cardboard. He never opened the books. 

He saw Her there; she flitted through the shelves like a ghost, or a butterfly, only soft colors through the books. Once he turned down an aisle, and he was facing her. Her face went pale, her eyes flashed. He smiled, her eyes flickered over to the books in his arms, she smiled and they both passed, her arm almost grazing his. 

The five friends would gather at night and be seditious. They would sneak down to the basement of whichever house they were at, with each step a layer shed. By the time they reached the bottom, their relationship - the cavalier remarks to the pretty ones and the mischievous pranks on the pompous b******s " to the Others had been refined to a point, honed like Bodaccia’s sharp blade plunged into the heart of Rome, the cold metal slashing through the sinew and muscle of the provinces into the warm pulsing Senate meetings and imperial ignorance in the dead of night, naked and illusory bodies undulating and sliding across the compressed blackness of history, the old that the boys were supposed to forget, and only remembered in the blankness of unlit basements in hushed, furtive, insistent, persistent, demanding whispers of naïve ideals. 

They would talk for hours, low voices hissing around the small, tight knot they formed, like gas leaking from a cracked pipe in the President’s mansion that had caused the explosion (they said) the night before the election. They talked of old days, forced forgottens, deep, sedentary hidden dead bodies of time before the divergence, when man was still unified, when war was the only renting force. 

They stole books (god knows where from, god blanching at what, which dripping dank alleys those innocents, faces smudged dark with paint like prehistoric coal dust on the sick and dying miners’ faces, crouched in half the night for, like drug dealers " an old concept they particularly were intrigued by" waiting for the delivery of knowledge, of their salvation, they thought. The grotesque escape, the business of corruption, or perhaps of rescue? And the laughed, forced jovial stories they told of the dark underpinnings of this cowardly new - reality, Jonathon thought - place they had been born into. 

- He thought, frowning and trembling, of his story that would never be told. What the man had wanted for his knowledge, for that book of Plato, what he had demanded from the young boy, paling still to remember the coughed, rasped words, the slimy touch of this abandoned, repudiated man against his slender body, and the frantic fluttering of his mind to get away, a caged canary battering itself against the walls, pain numbed by the fear, the visceral need for freedom; then later, staggering sprint through the backstreets, his white sneaks splashing like bombs into the puddled ruts that ran down the sides of the street, the white stained with fetid browns and greens, and the tearing pain in his side, collapsed into a wall, Her face flashing once before his eyes, ragged breathing " he had vomited then, emptied his body into the ancient draining systems in this forgotten sublevel of the city - 

And the boys reverently pulled out the contraband they had acquired - the cold smell of mold and leather - and slowly, solemnly turned the pages, like acolytes before the tomes of a brittle, antediluvian religion in their basement cave) and would share them with each other. And then a creak above, sawdust and aged silt (this was the house of a Normal) falling beneath the feet of the muffled voices, and the rush to hide them in the backs of closets or the bottoms of molded trunks, the full knowledge in the back of their minds of what that hiding meant " death " shed slowly with each step they took up the stairs. 

He was having trouble. He couldn’t get past mid-chest. It was blocked, the layers would only unpeel to right above where his ribs raised up into the hollow U of his breastbone, feel a steely choking compression, and then stop, as if something wouldn’t let him pass by. 

Why was he doing it, we might ask. What reason could he have to defy the Others, and to defy physics, what excuse could he have to pursue these foolish games of his - how pointless, we might think, he is merely a Normal, he is only a nothing. He is no messiah, he is no saint, he is no one. None. One. No, he might think, no one can do it. I will be that no one. That none - the silent fury and the space that hangs unsaid between walls and people - I will embody it, I will possess it, I will let it posses me. He might have said. 

He read about the old physics, its union with religion, the idea of miracle and the transparent film of reality. A slight pressure on that film, and it would evaporate in one place, where his will was greater than the common perception, and he could step through that hole. That was belief, and the individual in the greater concept of infinity and religion. 

Jonathon raised his hand: but where did this mutation come from? It had been two weeks, and things had not changed; they were still being called in by Dame Dara, they were still whistling at the pretty female Others. 

What do you mean, Jonathon? the teacher asked, it’s only a mutation. They just happen. 

Do they? Jonathon asked 

Well, yes, the teacher responded, blinking. 

We don’t know where it came from, do we? Jonathon pressed, then thought: How scary, this looming force rising from the unknown, emerging from a dark cave and then just fear and a dazzling perfection. 

Well, not the specific time or place... but, after all, it’s just a mutation. 

It’s just a mutation? How can one mutation cause so much change? Jonathon thought, then he asked: Where is the mutation? 

Genetically? 

Yes. 

Silence, a sideways look, eyes darkening. 

I see. 

The boys found a book on saints and decided that they needed one of their own. They came across many names, let their fingers softly linger on the faded, peeling gold, the hollow words of long dead martyrs. Their own names - John, Paul, Mark, good Other names - lay there, silent in their respective boxes and sepulchers, but they couldn’t patronize themselves. Instead, they chose Judas - he had a beautiful story, and he was unrecognized (for he had a name twin, another recognized, but hated, and marked, and weak); he was only a last resort saint, and they loved him for that. 

One day, the boys got into a fight. They had been in front of the main Normal entrance to the Language Hall, sitting on a stone bench, talking about old religion and cult and an Other had walked by. He had heard them, and demanded to know what they were talking about. 

They had glanced, stricken, at each other - were they caught, then, after all they tried, after all their secrets, by an Other lurking in the shadows? - and Paul, quick at everything, had sneered, Slumming, are you? 

The Other had stared back, aghast at his impudence, his sheer rebellion; he had never conceived of anything like this. And he had raised his hand to strike Paul (his manicured hand, soft and smooth, Jon thought, perhaps like Her’s? but would her’s be so awful? would he sit for her upraised hand?) and the other four boys had lunged at the Other, thrown him on the ground, punched him, rubbed his face in the dry flowerbeds lining the sidewalk, left him bruised and bleeding, stepped away when they heard the cries and hue from the administrators (disciplinarians, really), left him recoiling in agony, sprawled, half on the grass, half on the sidewalk, and Paul still sitting on the bench, his mouth slightly open, eyes half-shut, body tensed to receive the redirected blow. 

Well, boys, you’ve done it again, the Dame said, the conversation familiar, the boys parroting her words and nervous gestures, Paul mimicking her eye tic, James (they all called him Jim) her fluttering hands, Mark following her paces around the room. Jonathon sat in the window seat and watched it all, trying to smother his laughter, quite unsuccessfully, his brain flashing back to the stricken look on the Other’s face, incomprehensive, not sure what to do with his haughty expression. 

- Shove it up yer a*s, Paul had said, sufficiently recovered, and now performing quite admirably the role of self-righteous martyr.

- His mouth had gaped like a fish pulled from the ocean to die on the floor of the boat by dinnertime. He had tried to push himself up to sitting, Paul had kicked him down, just to get his own in, because here were the administrators, and he knew he would be punished with the rest of them anyways. 

Look, you boys have been a thorn in my side ever since you started attending here, the Dame lectured, behind her, Andrew, his arms spread in a T, head lolled sideways, tongue hanging out. 

I just don’t know what to do with you, she continued, shooting dark looks around the room, while behind her back, Philip mimicked a very inappropriate suggestion of what could be done. 

If you were dumb, this would be much simpler, she said, a new turn to the dialogue, stilling them - admitting that, despite their status as Normals, something very different (and perhaps mildly illegal) was going on here. 

If only you hadn’t such promise, I could just throw you away. She paused, sighing. But this is difficult, you really are something you shouldn’t be. You are Normals. You should go on to become machinists and drudges and all that, but you’ve much greater capacity than most of the Others here. She stopped again. They could see the haunted look in her eyes, sense the deep promise they had to give " their bond with her more than just scorn and punishment, they knew, now realizing the extent of the mutual respect they had both buried under layers of derisive laughter and didactic sermons. Her need for their cooperation, the danger they both faced. 

They silently waited for her to continue. 

I just don’t know what to do with you, a confession, almost. 

Silence, long, thin, heavy. Then, It’ll be all right. From the window. 

From that moment on, they felt like they were on the verge of something, like some kind of revolution, something greater than the normal turning of the brittle, crystalline spheres, and the air was thick with it. 

But he was still stuck. He still couldn’t get past his chest. 

Their nights down in the basements under the houses were more tense, more nervous, more agitated. The books became something more than holy to them, turned into a portal, almost, into those divine realms that they were searching for. They became more than just an escape, but the reality, heightened, more vibrant than the actual lives they spent their days in. 

Religion has died, Jonathon whispered one night, the others turned, shocked at his blasphemy. 

No, my anarchy, Jonathon corrected. 

They huddled together, shoulders touching, faces covered in dark shadows from the small lamp, center of the circle. Jon held a book beneath it, reverently turned the pages. The others gathered close, silently observing; down here, they shed their rowdiness, shed their boyhood, grew silent and grim, like the revelers of some ancient pagan religion stilled by the great, dark image of the Mother Goddess revealing herself before them, emerging from the cave, cloaked in shifting shadows, above, a diadem of tangled branches and thorns and her dark hair whipping in the wind. Dazzling. And them, struck silent and cold by the awesome strange otherness before them, a regency springing from some deeper, arcane source. They could only sit fearful before that manifestation of power. 

Jonathon was in biogenetics when he heard the knocking at the window, saw Peter outlined by the sun, a square block dark against the glass next to him. He ran over, the rest of the class following, saw the huge grin, read the headline on the newspaper Peter pressed to the window. So, Jonathon thought, they were not the only people aware of this feeling of revolution. 

That night, before his parents came home from work at the factory, he tried again. He could push through his bedroom wall into the kitchen up to his hips, the slide through smooth up to there, then increasing pressure up to his chest and then it was as if the wall had closed around it, he could feel his heart beating into the wall, hear it loudly resonating - the wall’s reality had won, and he couldn’t overcome it… But today, it seemed less, as it the will against him was weakening, was less solid, and he knew he would be able to disassemble it soon. 

What is a building but concentrated dust, Jonathon thought. He had read that somewhere… Consecrated dust?… But we cannot hallow this ground, it is already hollowed, the tombs of forgotten soldiers and empty pockets inside the earth. Somebody said that as well. So much emptiness, Jonathon thought, if only I could put it all together. 

The boys sat on the corner; they had gotten some ice cream at the store. They bantered: 

Three weeks left till end of term. 

Yeah, but you won’t make it, Jim. Peter elbowed him, grinning. 

Oh, yeah, Andrew added, his face solemn and grave, I overheard Cale talking to the Dame in the hallway " your atrocious results on his final, y’know… Sorry " and we thought you had promise… 

Aww. Lucky for me, Dara fancies me. Keeps me on. Don’t know about you poor fools. 

Maybe, except… Phillip studied him, his eyes serious, judging… his decision: You’ve got that awful orange hair. He reached over and tousled it. 

Hey! Get off! It’s the hair she likes best! 

What are you boys doing. A command, the answer inherent " you are doing Wrong. 

The Other looked down at them. He was tall and wore an impressive uniform. The boys looked at each other. They couldn’t fight this one. Around the corner, marching in the street, came a band of tired looking Normals. They had guns, big ugly dangerous looking ones. Jonathon raised his eyebrow, a slender arc. Paul looked at him, back at the marching.

Troops? he mouthed.

I don’t know, Jon shrugged, but they’re using us to control us. 

Paul looked back at him. Would you? 

Jon shook his head. I wouldn’t use Others to control Others. 

The Other still stood there, hands on hips, swaggering and chest puffed. He had a riding crop in his hand. Well? he said, obviously expecting an answer to his statement. 

We’re doing nothing, Jim frowned up at him, just eating ice cream. 

The officer scowled and bent down, his face sweaty beneath the blue helmet. The gold-trimmed loops of his uniform hung down, almost touched Jim. The man jerked backward. Probably stole the money, he muttered. 

He turned to leave, flicking his crop into Phillip’s cone, knocking the ice cream onto the grey sidewalk. Oops, he grinned, teeth white and even; then his back, and he was walking away. But slowly, waiting… 

Just go, Jon thought, just leave, just leave. 

Jim stood up. 

No, Jon thought, Jim sit down, he’ll hurt you. We’re only little boys eating ice cream, just sit down and he’ll leave us alone. 

Jim walked toward him, shouted, grabbed the man’s arm, the sacred, untouchable arm, wrapped in the silky blue uniform -

Jim didn’t die, but Jonathon cried. He had never cried for as long as he could remember, not even when the man beat him, cut deep below his ribs with the ceremonial sword, slashed it across his arm, cutting the skin beneath his wrists, left him crumpled in the street. He didn’t know what happened to the rest, as he wandered, dazed, for three days, ducking into corners when he saw troops of Normals - of him, rows and rows of himself, endlessly repeated, endlessly marchin, all with a tall, straight-backed Other herding them. He must have circled the city at least five times before he found his house, he later realized. There were points when all he wanted to do was just lie down, sleep, die, melt into the cement sidewalks. Her face flashed through his mind. His poor teenage mind focused on Her through the pain: will she cry for me? - he mouthed her name, his shoulders twisted, he threw his chest - agony - against the walls hiding him from the troops, as he screamed wordless, silent, and suffered from his wounds.. He had sunk to the ground, finally, forehead pressed against the cold stone, eyes closed. Was transcendence worth all this? 

When he found home, eventually, his parents were asleep. It was early morning. He staggered to his room. 

And when the men met again, in the darkness, hidden and alone, Jim was not there. Jim was beaten, Jim was broken. And Jonathon cried, then. 

Jim, hey! Jonathon ran to catch up with him, then, bent over, hands on knees, breath heavy, looking up and smiling, How are you? 

His eyes flashed, like a dead fire flaring, and then grew dim. I’m fine. Thanks for the book. He began to walk. 

Jim, wait! Jon straightened, grabbed his arm and Jim’s twisted face looking down at Jonathon’s hand. Fear, hatred, love, sympathy? And then all gone in the blankness. Jon dropped his hand. 

By the end of that week, the week the basement meetings started again, the week after the cuts were scabbed and bruises faded, the week before term ended, things had changed again. 

They gathered on the Green, right in the middle of the day, at least twenty other Normals with them - and they openly discussed art, politics, science, whatever they wanted. 

Do you think classes will continue, a youngish boy asked (probably a first year, Jonathon thought), his face eager, pushing his glasses back with the heel of his hand. 

Well, they’re teachers, Paul said, they were before the election (-but they weren’t all Others, then, Jon thought darkly), so they’ll probably stay. 

-But they were a unique breed, they were teachers, after all. They dealt with Normals on a daily basis, and that required a certain…stamina, as some of the administrators said. 

And what about the Others? Will they leave? 

Paul looked across the Green. Well, look, he said pointing, there’s a crowd right there. He waved, grinning. A knot broke off, walked away, arrogant, disinterested, or maybe afraid, Jon thought. 

-She stayed, he noticed. He still saw her at lunch, still saw her walking across the Green to the dormitory she stayed in, one of the dormitories that, by this time next year, would house Normals. He smiled, and " was the sun in his eyes, was he blinded, how could he know? " she smiled back. 

The rest hovered, talked quietly to themselves, one waved, and then they, too, left. 

One day, he awoke knowing that today he would do it. His body would transcend simple matter, and he would do it. 

How did we know, we might ask. He would just shrug, grinning, but with shadows in his eyes. 

The walk to school was long, elongated, the streets narrowed to an infinite point. The hallways at school stretched endless. His steps slowed and his breathing, each expectant, keen breath long as the whole life that had preceded it. His body felt heavy and hot, as if, were he lit on fire, he would burn for a long, long time. 

And then he saw Her. The next hallway over, slightly to the left and above. He called to her, his voice slow and deep. She turned, equally slowly - did she know his voice? - eyebrows raised and hair slightly swishing in a soft, lingering circle around her face. He walked towards her hallway, the one he was never supposed to enter, the door he could never find, and reached toward her, one arm extending through the column, his outside peeling back, and then to his shoulder, and then his whole side, one leg through, stepping, and then,  he knew it, he knew it would work, had to work, his chest and his head, at once, and - unexpected, glorious - a golden, blinding flash, his ears hummed, his heart was squeezed, wascompressed into hardest nothing, and his eyes were dazzled by the diamond-like brightness, it seemed like forever, his whole body warmed, he must be in fire (or was it on fire?), and then he stepped up and out, and he was through. She stood there, waiting for him, a slight smile playing across her lips, like the setting sun on a deep pool, only little glimmering hints of all beneath and within. 

“Hello,” he said. 

“Hello,” she replied. “Have you read the news today?”

He nodded.

"Everything has changed."