The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell Read online

  No, you didn’t.

  Why not?

  Because you used to be someone else.

  When he did not reply, after a moment the familiar offered, Let me manage putting you to sleep and waking you again. I shall make sure you won’t worry about any sounds.

  No, he mouthed. And when he sensed it mustering evidence for why this would be best for everyone: “No!”

  It was a shock to hear his own voice aloud, at night, alone, in the dark.

  He submerged the familiar again, down to where he wouldn’t have to be consciously aware of it. He knew where to find it if he needed it. It would always be there, until he was dead.

  He lay staring into the dark.

  One day, he worried, the familiar would simply take charge of his sleep whether he requested it do so or not. Surely it had programs and protocols that would activate if, one night, he was too anxious or too panicked or just seemed otherwise not right in some measurable way. Perhaps that night was tonight.

  Yet another part of him thought, Why not let it put me to sleep? It could do so instantly, and awaken him instantly as well. It could, so it had informed him, regulate his sleep cycle with an exactitude calibrated for maximum benefit. Conveniences such as these were among the few things he had gained from having the familiar wedged into his brain, though they were next to nothing compared to what he had lost.

  No, he couldn’t trust it, even if it was part of him now.

  He felt it fluttering upward.

  Feeling paranoid? the familiar asked. Would you care to be soothed?

  He ignored it. After a time, he felt it sink down again, but of course it was never quite gone.

  After a while, he gave up on falling back to sleep. He got up. He did not turn on the light because of the others sleeping in the house. Besides, it did not matter; the familiar was expert at helping his brain make the most of whatever limited visual input his eyes received from the darkness. It was nothing like seeing in daylight, but it was enough.

  The tile floor was cool beneath his feet. The familiar began to rise to inform him of precisely how cool, but he tamped it down. There was no advantage in knowing so much about the world around him. He padded barefoot across the tile, exactly sixty-five degrees, then over the synthetic wool rug, then over the tile floor again.

  In the hall, near the foot of the stairs, he hesitated. He had intended to go to the living room and find his tablet and read in the dark, but he wasn’t sure anymore.

  I can read to you, the familiar said. Can even project the words before you if you so desire. You don’t need a tablet. You only need me.

  He hadn’t felt it rise, but there it was, insisting on being heard.

  No, he told it. I’ve changed my mind.

  He climbed the stairs. He traveled from bedroom to bedroom as silently as he could. He opened a door and stepped in, regarding the dim shape in the bed and listening to it breathe. The shape was positioned just right, the face exposed to the moonlight streaming through the window, and he could see the flutter of eyes moving quickly under lids. A little envious, he wondered what the dreams concerned.

  Or at least he thought he could see the eyes moving beneath the lids. Maybe this was just his familiar extracting data from the darkness and modifying it according to his wishes, filtering it, showing him what it thought he desired to see.

  He went through all four bedrooms, regarding the sleeping bodies. He stayed in the last room the longest, hesitating, not because it had anyone special in it but because it was the last room. My progeny, he thought, and tried and failed to feel anything. Then thought, Why call them that? Why not offspring or descendants or simply children? Though children wasn’t the right word either, since he was so different from them now. Almost as if he and they were two different species. They did not experience the same world as he did.

  He had been told the repurposing of the brain was safe. Research shows you only use a certain percentage of your brain, the researchers had reasoned, and the brain is remarkably plastic and capable of shifting a given function from one area to another, particularly in the case of someone as young as you. And so they had installed the familiar, threading it in and through his brain tissue, meticulously programming how it would grow and when said growth would stop. They would be careful, they told him, to leave intact any nuclei that showed potential for significant activity. Really it hardly touches the brain at all. And then, later, afterward, they kept claiming that it should have worked even though it did not. That the flaw, if there was a flaw, must have been with him.

  Now, years later, experts had reached a conclusion they should have come to from the outset: there were no unused portions of the brain. Which meant that in installing his familiar, they had irrevocably damaged the cells that governed his ability to dream. And his emotions had been blunted too, muted in the way they often were with, just to give one example, psychopaths.

  In the bed the shape moaned, rolled over slightly, then settled again. He moved slowly out of the room, pulling the door softly closed behind him.

  After that initial test group he had been part of, the procedure was abandoned. They went back to external augmentation, working to improve it. Tomorrow, his progeny would awaken and affix their augments like crowns around their brows and, for the remainder of their waking hours, operate with great efficiency, pretending to not be human. He of course did the same, the only difference being that he wasn’t pretending. They came home and removed their crowns, became human again, slept, dreamed. Not he. His crown was under the skin. He was no longer human.

  Slowly, surely, he made his way back to the landing and then down the stairs, his palm sliding lightly along the banister on the way down. Could he sleep now? Maybe, at least until his head started buzzing again. Would it?

  I could—his familiar started to say, but he quickly cut it off.

  Not now, he said. Please.

  He took another step down, but he was already at the bottom of the staircase. The shock of suddenly finding floor where he’d expected air sent pain shooting through his leg. How had he missed that? Why hadn’t he understood he had already arrived?

  Perhaps he had been distracted. Perhaps it was as simple as that, he tried to tell himself. Unless—

  No unless, said the familiar, its voice the barest whisper. No need to worry at all.

  He opened the door to his room and was shocked, momentarily, to see a figure there. In the bed, sleeping, its face turned in such a way that he could not clearly read it. But then, as he approached, he saw that it was him, that he was looking at himself. And then, a moment later, that what he had thought to be himself was in fact nothing at all: rumpled bedclothes, nothing but sheets, one blanket, a half-folded pillow.

  He reached out and touched the bed. The sheets were cold.

  Sixty-five degrees, the familiar, unbidden, told him.

  Was someone else here? he wondered.

  Other than me? the familiar asked.

  Other than us.

  You should try to sleep, the familiar advised. You’ve already let most of the night get away from you.

  He stayed beside the bed, hesitating. And then, despite still being far from sleep, not knowing what else to do, not wanting to provoke it, he climbed in.

  That strange, almost fluttering sensation from deep within his mind, a sort of mental arrhythmia. It rose, it rose.

  I could simulate dreams for you, it offered.

  You’ve been listening in.

  Of course I have, it said. I always am.

  You always are, he acknowledged.

  I could simulate them for you, it said again. They would be very well done. You wouldn’t know the difference.

  That was what frightened him, that perhaps he wouldn’t know the difference. Perhaps the house was empty except for him. Perhaps he didn’t have any progeny. Perhaps progeny was, in fact, a word foisted onto him by the familiar and he was dreaming now. Or not dreaming exactly but experiencing the familiar’s version of what it
believed a dream to be.

  He tried to keep these thoughts fleeting, fugitive. He tried not to let any of them cohere into something the familiar would understand and act on.

  What else could you simulate? he thought carefully at it.

  Why, anything, the familiar said. I can help you experience absolutely anything at all. What would you like?

  He tried not to say or think anything. He closed his eyes and tried to relax the tension in his jaw. He breathed in a way he hoped would slow the beating of his heart, make him read to the familiar as relaxed, at ease.

  But it was not fooled. It never was.

  It surfaced fully.

  What can I do? it asked, the words painted fluidly on the walls of his skull. And then, with a terrifying sympathy, Poor, poor thing. How shall we make you better?

  Myling Kommer

  I.

  When he was young, just five or six, Jussi used to visit his great-grandmother, who was very, very old. She was confined to a nursing home, to one side of a room split in two by a curtain. By the time Jussi was visiting her, she was incapable of leaving the bed on her own. She wasn’t able to talk or, really, move. Sometimes her lips pursed at nothing. Sometimes her eyes seemed to follow him, but mostly they just stared at something that wasn’t there.

  “Mormor,” his mother would say to her, “here is Jussi, my son.” His mother would stand with Jussi just before her, her left hand on Jussi’s left shoulder, her right hand on his right. And then she would give him a little push forward, toward his great-grandmother.

  Her eyes were pale. The pupils were a wintry blue, like a crust of rime. Perhaps they had grown lighter over time, or perhaps they had always been that way—Jussi couldn’t say. They were unlike any eyes he had ever seen. Her flesh was blotched and crisscrossed with lines and folds. Her gray hair was long, bunched into an untidy braid. His mother unbraided her hair, combed it, and rebraided it each time they visited. Jussi didn’t think anyone else bothered with it in the meantime.

  His great-grandmother had an intense presence for Jussi. She loomed. There she was, in the bed above him, implacable, immovable, slightly terrifying.

  “Mormor,” Jussi’s mother would say, “can you talk to us? Do you have anything you care to share?”

  His great-grandmother never responded. After a moment, his mother would extract from her handbag a notepad and a pencil. She opened the notepad and placed it in Mormor’s lap and brought the tips of the fingers to feel out the edge of it. In the other hand, his mother placed the pencil, coaxing the bony fingers to grip it. Once they did, his mother would guide the pencil’s tip to the top of the page.

  “Now, Mormor,” she would say, her lips very close to the old woman’s ear, “now is the time to show off that you are alive. Write.”

  Did she write? Yes, sometimes. Mostly the pencil stayed motionless and eventually spilled from her hand. After that happened, Jussi’s mother would sigh and say, “Your great-grandmother is having one of her bad days.” Other times, the pencil scrabbled its way across the page in an incomprehensible scrawl. “What is it, Mormor?” his mother might say to her, seeing this. “What are you trying to tell us?” Much more rarely, twice in all the time he had gone to see his great-grandmother, she would write something that was clearly a series of letters, but letters forming words Jussi didn’t understand.

  Ritt, she wrote, the first time.

  “No, Mormor,” said Jussi’s mother. “I’m Sona, Ritt’s daughter.”

  fa Ritt, she wrote, a strange blot over the a.

  “I can’t, Mormor,” said Jussi’s mother. “She’s not here.”

  For a moment, his great-grandmother’s gaze focused on Jussi. Her eyes seemed vivid and alive, as if someone who had been deep inside had managed to struggle her way briefly to the surface.

  Myling, she wrote.

  “No, Mormor,” said his mother. “It’s Jussi, my son.”

  Myling, she wrote again, but her gaze had deadened, and the writing trailed off before it achieved its conclusion. If he hadn’t already seen the word once, written more clearly, he wouldn’t have known what it was meant to be.

  “That’s enough of that,” his mother said, and plucked the pencil from the old woman’s failing grip.

  Later, in the car on the way home, he asked his mother, “Who is Myling?”

  “What,” said his mother.

  “Myling. Who is he?” he repeated, thinking she hadn’t heard.

  His mother shook her head. “Not a who,” she said. “A what. It’s old stories,” she said. She waved one hand dismissively. “Nothing to think about.”

  He didn’t say anything, just kept looking at her as she drove. Offering this simple, uninterested attention, he had discovered, was the best way to keep her talking.

  “A ghost of sorts,” she said, after a moment. “Or not a ghost precisely. There’s no good word for it in your language.”

  “In our language, you mean,” he said.

  “Our language,” she conceded. She did not look at him, just kept staring out the windshield.

  “Something that has never been alive,” she said. “Or alive only briefly, rather, and then abandoned by its mother. But not quite dead either.”

  hjelp meg, she wrote the second time, all lowercase. She was staring at him as she wrote it. It seemed like help me, but with too many letters, as if she was forgetting the words as she wrote them, or as if other words were trying to force their way through. Except for her eyes, her face as she wrote remained slack and inanimate. Shortly after that, partly overlapping the earlier words, she wrote, de kommer.

  And then, drep meg.

  “What does she mean?” Jussi asked his mother.

  “Nothing,” his mother said. “The same old nothings. She is lost in her fears, this one. Nothing is coming for her.”

  myling, his great-grandmother wrote. myling kommer.

  And that was all.

  That was, in fact, his final visit to see his great-grandmother. A few hours later, just after they’d reached home, a call from the nursing home informed them that she was dead.

  II.

  Jussi thought frequently about those two visits during the year or two after his great-grandmother’s death. And then he forgot about them.

  He hadn’t attended her funeral. He was too young, his mother claimed—though if that was the case, he wondered later, hadn’t he been too young to visit her in the nursing home too? In any case, she was buried without Jussi to witness it.

  After that first year or two he only thought about her fleetingly, at the oddest moments: a memory of her pencil scratching its errant way over the paper, a dream of her eye following his face as he moved about the antiseptic room, the partitioning curtain swaying when he brushed past. But by the time he started high school, even those dreams and vague memories had dried up.

  He grew older. He moved out of his parents’ house and into the dorms of the local college. He became his own man, as his mother liked to say, or at least set about becoming such. He went home only for holidays, or when he wanted someone to wash his laundry.

  He was back there one day, a Saturday, lolling about. It was sunny, and he was lying on the couch in the parlor, watching motes of dust float gently in a shaft of light. This was the room his mother kept for visitors. Unless one was a visitor, one was not allowed to enter without first removing one’s shoes and washing one’s hands. He had done neither, but his mother had not noticed him in there yet.

  On the fireplace mantel was a familiar series of framed photographs. His mother and now-absent father in their wedding clothes, grinning like mad. One of his own primary school class pictures, first grade maybe. A picture of him a few years older, in a park, smiling broadly, two of his teeth missing. The three of them together, wearing Hawaiian shirts and smiling stiffly for an occasion he could no longer remember.

  But behind these, half-hidden, were two pictures he didn’t remember being there before. What were they? He got up to look at them. One
, he realized immediately, was his grandmother, though much younger. He had seen it before, but perhaps somewhere else in the house, in a drawer, not here. She was flush against some kind of bluish background, but the colors in the photograph had washed out enough with time that it was hard to say how dark the blue had been.

  The other photograph was older, black and white, in a gilt frame. It was of a woman he didn’t recognize. Young, in her twenties perhaps. She was smiling so hard that her eyes were nearly swallowed up by her cheeks, hardly more than slits.

  “Shoes off,” his mother said firmly from behind him.

  Using only his insteps, he slipped both shoes off his heels and kicked them into the hallway.

  “You washed your hands?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

  “Liar,” she said with a smirk, but did not insist.

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “That?” His mother reached out and touched the frame. “Your great-grandmother, of course. My mormor.”

  It did not look at all like her. Maybe if she hadn’t been smiling and her eyes had been open, he would have recognized her. He stood staring at the image, trying to see the old, old woman he had met hiding within it, failing.

  “Why haven’t I seen it before?” he asked.

  His mother shrugged. “I couldn’t have it up,” she said. “Your grandmother wouldn’t allow it.”

  “No?”

  “No. Even now, she would take it down if she saw it.”

  “Why?”

  “Did I really never tell you?” she asked. “Your grandmother despised her.”

  Why is it, he wondered, that you only learn the specifics of the conflicts within your own family when you are grown and it is too late to avoid having been influenced by them unawares? Why only after you have metabolized them and made them part of your whole way of looking at the world?

  But was that really the case? Could he really believe his fear of his great-grandmother at age six, unless it had been five, his sense of her looming presence, came down to things he had overheard his grandmother say to his mother? If that was the case, why could he remember nothing at all of what he might have heard?