One Story

In the Wilderness of Sinai

Levi sat in an old diner waiting for his breakfast to come out. He was smoking and scraping up eggs. It was a long week waiting for the end of the world. The face of God had turned away from him. He was alone again. His rabbi in Boca Raton was worried, said he should stop trying to get hired by the Company. But it was the only thing Levi knew how to want—professional advancement. After his girlfriend left him, he sought out sex clubs with seedy reputations. He tossed ones at girls rubbed down in glitter. Miami bored him. There was nothing behind the women’s facade. At work, there was always more to discover. Another chemical compound behind another chemical compound. He paid his bill and got back in his car. The sun cascaded down on him, beads of sweat turning into little waterfalls down his forehead. His shoulders were a little burnt from the light through the windshield. He hated wearing a white wife beater but it was too hot for anything else.

            Driving down the Overseas Highway blasting an old Nirvana CD from his brother, Levi tried to make sense of his job prospects.

            The Company had called him and asked him to come down to the Keys. They had a special lab there out in the swampy-ass ocean of nowhere. That’s what the hiring manager said anyway. Levi was surprised he was a man. The professional-sounding masculine voice told him to show up on November 12. They would pay for a hotel since it was remote. Or he could opt to stay on the island where the lab was. A boat would take him in the morning and he could decide before the last ride back at four. It sounded like an eat-the-rich situation. He wasn’t sure it was the kind of gig he would ever escape. His last job fired him after he was accused of “inappropriate speech” in the work place. An expletive-laden report on his programming team’s progress.

            For so long, Levi wanted to be the kind of company guy everyone praised. Focused, determined, beloved. But he was too intense. All the brushstrokes of his paintings were visible. Any new project he turned on stank of his desperation to look good to the higher-ups. No one thought he would be able to make it beyond the lower-level programming jobs. It took him years to master all the languages. Even Python puzzled him.

            His hotel was in Key West. The Company booked it for him a few weeks ago. All expenses paid. They encouraged him to contribute to the local tourism industry since he opted to stay there. They preferred for the locals to like them. In the morning the boat would come and take him away, he had a whole evening to enjoy however he wanted. But they knew what he was going to do. The low crackling voice made that clear.

            It was a strange phone call. Not one he wanted to repeat. Levi almost wanted to tank the interview so he could say he tried his best and go back to his normal life. Something like his last job. Algorithms, robotic programming, nanotechnology start-ups that never worked. The last one he worked on was called Dragonfly and involved trying to make the tiniest drone he could. They kept throwing money at him until it was clear he was trying increasingly bizarre tactics. When they found him reading the Zohar on the job, they fired him. That was what sent him back to Miami. His brother mocked him every morning about being the rich as fuck jobless one their parents were more proud of even though his brother was the one with the stable job, wife, and two kids. Youngest child privilege.

A few hours later, Levi pulled into the hotel parking lot, lit up by tropical neon and decked out with offensive and obnoxious little tiki gods. That wasn’t even local, just a mistaken migration. He waited a few minutes before going on in, smoking another cigarette and getting the lay of the land. The sun was almost completely below the horizon line. He hadn’t been out this far since he was a kid. A stray cat wound its way across the gravel to him and mewed. Brushing a fly aside, he leaned down to pet the scared little guy before realizing the creature was gnawing on his shoe. Levi lightly kicked it away and walked inside to get his room key.

Talia was the name she gave him on the phone. He doubted that was her actual name, but didn’t press. The TV crackled across from him. The girl’s photo still glimmered on his phone. He wasn’t sure what to say despite having done this a few times now. Just accepted the rate and tried to gauge her interest over the phone. Sometimes he read sex worker reddit threads, looked to see what they did and didn’t like in their clients. Every once in a while, on a break from work, he’d crack open an IPA and smoke a black American Spirit while reading one of their memoirs. Always memoirs. There were one or two real stylists, some theory-heads, but he wasn’t sure what to make of those. He preferred when he could look down at the book rather than holding it up to the light like a confusing academic article.

            When she finally knocked an hour after his intake call, he was spick and span. Showered twice. Smile. Let her in. The room was grimier than he was. Couldn’t be helped. He wasn’t the proprietor.

            “Hi,” Talia said low, quiet, breathless. It was good, Levi thought. Not too overdone but it got the point across.

            “Hi,” he said. “Levi.”

            “Talia. But I guess you know that. Do you have cash?”

            She was all the way in his room now. There was no need for violence, but he wondered what it would be like, to not feel remorse. That was his problem. The guilt. Textbook nutcase with a cushy job.

            He gestured toward a stack of hundreds on a table.

            “You still want five hours?”

            Levi nodded silently. She walked over to him as if in appreciation and started fondling his shoulders. Rehearsed, choreographed, yet mostly natural. He was analyzing her performance. Rating her moves, how aroused he got.

            It didn’t need to be efficient. In fact, he gave points if she surprised him. But that almost never happened. He knew he wasn’t special, he was just another connoisseur and she was an amateur. No matter, in Key West there was no reason to be the best.

            She moved rhythmically, slowly letting his dick slosh inside her, not quite hard enough to do any damage. The dull wet feeling didn’t do much for him. Not that it was her fault, he was swimming in too many unnamed feelings. That always prevented him from finishing. Talia tried to pant and whine to speed him up, scooching up and down on him faster as she touch his bare chest with her lacy little fingers. The red nail polish was just starting to chip.

            If only he could fake it. Could pretend it was a dry one. But Levi had some dignity anyway, wanted to try and bare with her for the ride. She was going to try until he told her to stop or the time ran out.

            “Wait a second,” he said after she squeezed her breasts in front of his foggy gaze. “Can we pause?”

            “Sure,” she said. “That’s fine, yeah.”

            Talia demounted and Levi realized he was fully flaccid.

            “You ever fucked someone who’s uncut?” he asked.

            “Is that what gets you hot?” she said, putting the gum in her purse away again, ready to be done with him.

            “No,” Levi replied. “I just wondered.”

            “Most of the guys around are circumcised, sure, but not everyone. I’ve had a few.”

            “Did you like it?”

            She shot him a weird look and he swallowed it whole, digesting her ire with ease. He didn’t look away or say anything else.

            “Sometimes.”

            They still had a lot of time, at least two hours, and she had a feeling he was a big tipper. Her glittery emerald lingerie lay neatly folded on the one chair in the room.

            “Why are you here?”

            “Job interview.”

            “Are you Rob the Doll’s new keeper?”

            “No,” he said. “That’s not why I’m here.”

            “Do you know the story though?”

            “Yeah,” he said.

            “Creeps me out.”

            “Want to have a cigarette outside?”

            He wanted to kill time. Careful not to think about the last time he saw Riley. She was back in the Bay probably, unless she went back to Omaha after her surgery. Poor thing. She wanted him to take care of her before he fucked it all up.

            Talia took out her own pack and lit a Virginia Slim. He laughed at her without thinking. She didn’t tell him to fuck off. They stood silently watching the few stars they could see blink and the ocean waves curling against the shore. He heard the cat mewing before he saw it again, crawling across the gravel towards them.

            “Hi little guy,” Levi said. “Should we go get him cat food?”

            Talia took another puff and looked down at him on the ground with just a hint of annoyance.

In the morning, Levi drove to the synagogue a few blocks away from the seaside motel. Amid melting palms and mandrakes, the old stone building stood majestically, a beauty, he thought to himself. Since his mom passed he’d only gone to temple a few times, usually only for the High Holy Days. But he was right back where he always was, feeling small and hopeful. Maybe salvation lay beyond the door. He’d been around too many Gentiles, all goyishly trying to tell him about their stance on Middle-Eastern politics without prompting. They felt guilty in a way he never did. Only the thought of avoiding services made him break out in a cold sweat. Those people over there were only dimly related to him. His mother was a fan of Edward Said and Real Housewives, the weirdest there ever was. She wanted to kiss him goodbye every morning as he went off to his Catholic school. “This is the melting pot of America,” she said. Her mother was Ukrainian and her father was Irish. They met in Brooklyn before swiftly moving down to Florida and Anglicizing their last name in the late seventies. She gave birth to Levi late in life, saying it was a blessing from the Holy One. All of this he swallowed with a grain of salt, wishing the palimpsest world she outlined was the one they lived in. Wished she gave his world more order, meaning.

            He was going to meet a rather obscure Kabbalist, one of the few known practitioners in Florida. It was early, only five-thirty or so. The boat was at seven. Plenty of time to discuss the possibility of a Tzadik ha-Dor.

            It wasn’t like Levi believed any of it. He just wanted to talk with someone who had beliefs beyond science. The stuff of life beyond life: the aftertaste of spirits.

            The rabbi had emailed him beforehand. They would speak for only twenty minutes. A short time to get to the bottom of things, but maybe he knew what Levi was really after. An argument. That would work well too, if he didn’t put up much of a fight, it would confirm his own take on things. Life and loss and the whole damn thing. His father used to talk a lot about Catholics with clenched teeth. He hated their conviction and ceremony, the strange deification of Jesus. After Levi’s father converted he was all in. Ready to fight the savior himself, just come down from the cross and throw a punch.

            “Hello Levi,” the rabbi said at the door. The old man led him into a small study cluttered with papers. “Have you come to try and make meaning out of your life?”

            Levi sunk into an old wooden chair. The room was full of stale-smelling books and diagrams and the one window was shuttered. Stones peered out from behind the small amount of space the bookshelves didn’t cover.

            “Maybe,” he said. “Can I smoke?”

            The rabbi gestured. There wasn’t much meaning to it, but Levi lit up anyway.

            “What do you make of the Tzadik ha-Dor?”

            “Why? What do you make of him?”

            “You think one’s alive right now?”

            “No, not necessarily,” the rabbi said.

            “I think he is. Or, if he is, in the sense that anyone could be the messiah if we put our minds to it. Save the people.”

            “You want to save God’s chosen people?”

            “Why not everyone? With science even. Easier that way.”

            “I see. So you’re a humanist, not a Zionist.”

            “Not a Zionist. A scientist. I work in nanotechnology.”

            “So what you’re saying is—”

            “Yes,” Levi interrupted.

            “That you think you’re the Tzadik ha-Dor?”

            “In a sense, yes.”

            The rabbi laughed and laughed.

            “Then I think we’re done here. I think we’ve covered the meaning in your life. Maybe there’s too much instead of too little.”

            He stood up and gestured for Levi to head to the door.

            “I’m about to have a job interview.”

The rabbi nodded, oblivious.

“Something called Project Nazareth.”

            The geezer’s eyes narrowed.

            “You’re going to regret this one day. You could have had a nice long chat with me and instead you chose—” Levi looked at his watch, less than twenty minutes even, hardly eight. “Eight minutes with the Tzadik.”

            “Mmmm.”

            Levi walked out and headed toward the dock, ready to meet his maker now that he felt confirmed in his righteousness.

***

The small motorboat took them across the clear blue water without incident. It was already heating up despite the early hour. Levi smoked the whole way, saying nothing to the two sailors who seemed to be punching below their weight. They mumbled softly about the weather to each other. He wondered if they read Hemingway on their off-time. Real men. Not the kind of financiers and gamers he worked alongside, they let their shit go online paying for webcam access to their ex-girlfriend. Boys and men were not so different in Levi’s estimation. One side of the spectrum just had more money for wish fulfillment. Men were sometimes even more envious. At his last job, Dragonfly, his co-workers all got blasted afterwards on the boss’s Cognac and Japanese whiskey. They even mixed the two into a feral potion. A bachelor bacchanalia.

            Men love corners. They love towers. Playing cards and broken glass, numbers ticking on a screen, projections, the image feedback loop. The slight slip of lacy black panties. Hints of debauchery, a misplaced word spoken in desire of fortune or lust. Desire meant one thing: scoring. Levi knew this because he felt it too. But he felt the desire to be the best too, to have one over on the others. That’s why they couldn’t stand him at Dragonfly, they knew he felt—or was—superior. A tower.

            The sailors didn’t think about gender so illustriously. They dumped Levi on the shore, a small rickety dock. No questions. There was just a job to be done.

            No one greeted him on the little island. There was a giant steel compound surrounded by a few smaller huts. Like Gilligan’s Island with a power plant. Wisteria and palm trees overran the brush. A few banyan trees loomed in the distance, maybe there was a lagoon he couldn’t see. The water was hysterically blue like a postcard for heaven. As he cut into the lush green he started to spot the flowers. Not all of them were instantly recognizable, vicious pinks and reds and oranges. Hibiscus. He knew that one. Birds twittered and chirped away, some pecking against wood. It was far more vibrant than in town, the neon and tourists cutting through any flora and fauna there actually was. He thought of his conversation with Talia and wondered if she made house calls. She wouldn’t care much about the surroundings. Or maybe she would, glad to get a break from the brown mucky of cheap motels and gray alleys.

            “Hello,” a voice called from somewhere behind the thicket of flowers.

            “Hello?” Levi said.

            A man in white appeared as if out of nowhere.

            “I’m Christian. We spoke on the phone last week.”

            “Yes, hello,” Levi reached out his hand and shook the older man’s grip. He was probably reaching fifty. Moderate build, no real muscle mass to speak of, wearing black work boots and a disheveled lab outfit. Bald, because, of course he was. No one with that much intellect worried about their hair. Levi wondered if they shared the same indulgence in the world’s oldest affection. He wanted to stop thinking about sex, but it kept coming back, like a hamster wheel. All his meds were in his backpack but he didn’t want to lose the upper-hand and dig into it now. The interview had begun.

            Slowly they made their way through the plumeria toward the big metal dome. Levi didn’t spot anyone else as they walked. There had to be others for a project this size.

            “If you accept this job, you’ll stay here with me. Could be a few years, could be decades. But the work is that important.”

            Levi didn’t ask why. He already knew why he had been chosen. All his bones vibrated in alignment at the thought, wet and sticky on his thigh like triumph.

            “This is Project Nazareth,” the man in white said. “We want to use some of your ideas in order to do more precise surgery.”

            “To help people?”

            The man hesitated, unsure how to clear the egotist’s doubt. “Yes, to help people. Everyone, really. You see… there’s a problem. We’re headed toward chaos. Everyone will eventually evolve too much too quickly.”

            “Evolve? Like, Darwinianly?”

            “Yes,” Christian said. “People will grow things they have no use for.”

            “How do you know this?”

            He shrugged. “Charts. Projections.”

            “You have a test case, don’t you?”

            The scientist smiled. “Of course.”

            “Show me,” Levi said.

            “Gladly.”

Lights flashed on and off all around them. Green, blue, yellow, LEDs of all colors. Steel poles jutting up like pikes. Long beams overhead rigged for the show. Scalpels, surgery tables like Messianic crosses, syringes, and what looked like medieval torture devices. Levi was just waiting to be shown leeches. Hisses and smoke purring from large machines producing very little output. Things trying to produce smaller and smaller probes. Clamps and retractors and suture packs avalanched off long metal tables. A giant saw caught his attention. As he walked over to it, he came across a pile of animal carcasses. Waste. Sheep mostly. Cattle. A pig.

            “We want to get to both rats, so we can prove we can do this on the tiniest of scales. You see, we’ll have to be very precise.”

            “Larger than a cow?” Levi quipped.

            The man was standing in front of a table with a single human arm.

            “What the fuck is that?”

            “Not a cow.”

            “What is all this for?”

            “Like I said. People will soon—and in some cases already have—grow things they have no use for. Look at this.”

            The man was already wearing gloves and a long white apron. It was pointless, as he cut into the forearm blood spattered everywhere, on clothes, on the table. He was careless. This was just a butcher show.

            Levi looked closer. There was a tiny thorn with its own nerves intertwined with the arm’s actual nervous system.

            “What the hell?”

            Christian put everything down.

            “This,” he said, throwing away the apron in a bin, “is an angel disease. There’s no official known cause or origin. Could be alien for all I know. They named it that cause they think it’s Biblical. I’m not so sure.”

            “The coming of the Tzadik…”

            “Hm?”

            “Nothing,” Levi croaked. “Doesn’t matter.”

            “So, before such a nightmarish plague becomes a pandemic, we’re trying to create the tech to deal with it. Top secret, privately funded, of course, though the government occasionally stops in to see how we’re progressing.”

            “How many people have it?”

            “Right now? Less than a dozen a year. In the next few decades? Who knows.”

            “How long do we have?”

            “If we hire you… I’d say no more than twenty years. Probably less.”

            They stood in silence. Levi was contemplating the pure strangeness of this. The nearness of it all to the spiritual.

            “So what’s next?”

            “I’ll let you stay the night. Meet the others. Eat with us tonight and we’ll see how you get on. Of course, how well you work with others is also a factor.”

            “Of course,” Levi smirked.

            “This doesn’t scare you at all? And you’re convinced?”

            He simply smiled in return. Had he not been waiting his whole life for the end?   

A soggy bowl of root vegetables sat on the cherrywood table before him. Levi ate a few bites before looking at the guests around him. Four men and one woman. They drank their green tea quietly. No one seemed ready to break the ice.

            “Just tea? You don’t have any liquor?” he jested.

            “We try not to have too many stimulants,” Christian said.

            “Right,” Levi said.

            “I could go for a drink actually,” the woman said without looking up from her plate.

            “And you think that would help you work better?”

            “I don’t know,” the woman said. “I just think it would be nice. Don’t you ever want something purely for the experience it offers?”

            Christian looked at her, bewildered, waiting for more. But that was all she offered. She pushed the veggies on her plate around as Levi watched. Was it evil to be sure? So soon? That she was the one?

            In his mind’s eye Levi saw a whole kingdom. He would kill all the dybbuks and demons and ghouls his grandfather told him about. Through science, not the Torah, and even then maybe G-d would have to bow down to him. This wasn’t a conscious thought, about G-d bowing, but it loomed in the back somewhere with the heavenly host Levi thought he commanded. The egotist didn’t think he was capable of blasphemy or self-deceit, only truth. The blanket that covers all else: vicious honesty told with a straight face. He couldn’t know if he was lying. That wasn’t in his nature. The stories that resonated with him were of Moses looking out over Israel, not the time he struck the rock and was punished not to see the new world he set up.

            The woman had moved on. She was almost done eating and was talking to another man. Asian, mid-thirties with a buzzcut.

            “How long has this been going on?” Another man said behind him. He tried to listen in to the dueling voices.

            “A few weeks, a month, I don’t know,” the other said.

            “And they’re for sure giving us the funding?”

            “Yes, they are. We can build a real hospital. A cover.”

            “What made them change their mind?”

            The other man made a physical gesture that Levi couldn’t make out.

            “Good. Good, okay… We should tell Christian. Maybe we can finally move bases. Fucking hate the Keys. A hurricane every other day.”

            “God’s plan.”

            They laughed. 

            Levi excused himself to go out and smoke. He didn’t want to sit and listen to the cloak and dagger politics of the pharmaceutical industry. Whatever they had to do to keep the lab running was their business. He was just coming to do whatever it was that needed done.

            The humidity seized his body. Even just walking out and sliding down against the wall he was sweating bullets. This wasn’t where he would’ve built a lab. But maybe no one bothered them here. Clearly it was all very top secret. He would have to lie about what his work was, why he was in Florida. There wasn’t really anyone to tell but still. His parents would hardly ask. They just wanted to be rid of him. They’d secretly wish it was farther away.

            He took out his flask and gurgled at least a shot’s worth of hot liquor. Everything was fried. Anyone else would’ve left it behind, said it was impossible, a farce, a secret cabal. He loved exclusivity.

            She slipped down beside him against the steel wall, crouching in the weeds. Sea roses and dandelions flowered in front of them. Without asking, she took his flask and sipped before passing the whiskey back to him. Still very beautiful, Levi thought.

            “I hate whiskey,” she said.

            “Well it isn’t yours.”

            She smiled at him, the crinkles around her lips appearing like small fissures of time.

            “I’m Mira.”

            “Levi.”

            “Ah.”

            “What?” he said, surprised at her tone.

            “Christian said he was bringing in a young guy from the States. That’s you.”

            “My mother is Polish. My father’s Irish.”

            “Were they born there?”

            “No,” he said. “Were you born outside the US?”

            “Yes. I’m here on a work visa thanks to Christian.”

            “Where are you from?”

            She cringed a little, moved slightly away from him in the breeze.

            “Should I make you guess?”

            Levi laughed. He liked her.

            “Please, God, no.”

            “India. But I’ve been abroad most of my life. Scotland, Australia, Sweden, Denmark. I’m a very cosmopolitan woman. I grew up watching Jeopardy with my dad while he worked at a nuclear reactor during the day.”

            “And your mom?” Levi found himself wanting to know more in spite of himself. His upper hand, his swagger, was faltering.

            “Oh she stayed home most of the time but she was a great concert pianist. We had to excel. That was how we got to see the world.”

            “And now you’re stuck on this little island.”

            “It’s not so bad,” Mira said. “I get to see what a little runt like you is made of.”

            She took his flask and walked off, downing nearly the whole thing in the process. Funny, he realized he didn’t even care.

            The voices inside died down as Levi walked around the grounds. It wasn’t a huge island, he traversed most of the expanse in an hour of wandering. Planes jetted overhead every so often, the leviathans of cruise ships docked in the distance. The sky purpled and faded into strata of indigo and ink. The palm trees and brush made it hard to work his way back toward the beach in the darkness, but he did his best to make it to the docks. There was only one vehicle. A small motorboat presumably for emergencies. The grime of the sand irritated his feet. He wanted to feel clean on the beach and instead felt a growing shrill voice in his mind. Fuck the summer.

            The last time he spent more than a few moments with his feet on the sand he was high out of his skull on acid standing next to a hooker he hired and subsequently refused to touch. No real reason why, he just didn’t feel like it. He liked that it made her nervous. Them in public, the electric green rush to the brain. In the end she walked off with her heels in hand back toward the mainland. He stayed on the beach until the sun rose and said a prayer, a blessing for the new year.

            That was a little less than a year ago. The year had been fruitful. It led to this.

***

August 13

Unbearably hot. Of course Christian hired me. What else was he going to do? I’m sick. Have been the past few nights, nauseous and gassy. Grotesque. He keeps coming to check on me, which is nice. Only asked about Mira once. She was busy working on her end of the deal—which Christian won’t tell me about for some reason. Annoying. It’s all very smoke and mirrors here. It’s only been a week and already I think of bolting sometimes. Not seriously, just the idea of leaving. Taking a flight to Toronto, Tokyo, Thailand, anywhere but here and this heat.

Christian says I’ll get used to it. He keeps bringing me concoctions. Smoothies and bowls and broth. I try to get it down but it’s shit. I want to be free of this mortal coil. Or whatever. Keep thinking of this girl Carly I used to know. I paid for her first abortion when we were in high school. She told me she only fucked me cause she felt sorry for me. Why her? I should try and phone the rabbi again. Haha. That’d be a laugh. He must hate me.

They say we’re going to try to start in earnest on developing smaller saws next week. I guess it’s one of the most important steps.

August 14

We went to a techno concert in Miami last night. Christian, Mira, and Qiang, who keeps telling us to just call him Q like a James Bond character. He’s the one who wanted to go. He said we should enjoy ourselves. Mira was excited by the idea of going out before we started in earnest, she said it was going to kickstart the process for us.

I didn’t recognize a song for almost an hour. Just drums and bass. I asked Qiang if this was something he had in China and he laughed at me. “We have everything.”

Eventually they played a Janet Jackson song sped up and remixed. I knew it from driving around with the radio on and the hot wind blasting, bright sky up above. I teared up and had to turn away from Mira. We were all on a lot of ecstasy. I kept re-upping until I was bleary-eyed and almost drooling and Christian and Qiang took me outside to lay down on the gravel outside the warehouse. It was pitch black and we could barely see the stars.

“Back on our island we’ll see a whole canopy of supernova,” Christian told us.

I wanted to to tell him I looked forward to it, but I couldn’t move my lips. They were incredibly dry and my tongue stuck to the bottom of the my mouth like an earthworm trapped in dirt. I nodded. Qiang said I needed some water and gum. He was talking about the advanced surgical technology he worked on before being poached by C. I wanted to ask more, it sounded interesting, like something out of a science fiction novel, but he assured me he was just here to help double-check our work.

Eventually Mira came out to check on us. She asked me what was wrong and then made fun of me. She said she was always cleaning up after some sloppy white guy in a club. Apparently her ex was a doctor, a Czech who moved to the states in the nineties.

“He was a drunk though.”

“Tough,” I said—immediately realizing how awful of a thing that was to say. She smiled softly in the moonlight. I wanted to kiss her but she put her hand firmly on my shoulder and made sure I kept laying down. Then I blacked out. Woke up in a cold sweat and resolved to do less next time. We start soon.

August 15

Tomorrow. Officially.

August 18

Since we’ve started I’ve barely had time to write. We’ve started the mechanics of a prototype. Qiang keeps looking over my shoulder and telling me I have to work harder. I don’t know what to tell him. I’m doing my best. Besides, isn’t Christian my overlord? Apparently in October the major funder is coming to check in on us. XA Holdings. They mostly work on biotech. I can’t find anything out about them on the internet but it’s not like we have good dial-up out here. It’s the dawn of the new millennium and I can barely hold on to the outside world.

At least the computing power is good. I was able to check a few calculations, look at things on a screen. Mira’s in a different department. An entirely different project. Related, C tells us, but he won’t say more than that. Disappointing. I was hoping to see more of her. Two nights ago a few people drank on the beach and told dirty jokes. I didn’t join. Mira wasn’t there and Qiang went to bed early. He’s funny but disciplined. Doesn’t want to get too involved with the others after the night out. I get that. I hope we make some progress soon. I know it’s too early to be anxious. That doesn’t matter. I want to push through. Show them what I can do.

I thought about The Dybbuk last night. It was a play my grandpa read in Yiddish to me as a kid. He made me watch the movie too. A dead lover is possessed by the titular spirit. I don’t remember it very well. Maybe I should read it again, just to have something to unwind with. Reminder to ask C if we can get books here. I wonder what my grandpa would think of me now… My mom would be happy I was taking an interest. But she hated superstition. Thought G-d was love. I’m not so convinced. I think G-d is power, exactly like we’re doing. Wish these notes were more focused, more helpful. Too tired to show any calculations or work things out in this little black notebook. It’s only for emotions and reporting. Later I can go back and see how they effected me.

August 19

Heard a few people talking about the logistics of the Angel Disease. Foolish of me to think morality wouldn’t play a part in this. But they wondered who got it and why. If both humans and animals can get it—can it be based on something people did or did not do? Or is it truly random? I listened to the debate, it felt like hearing the rebbe talk about old midrasnhic arguments.

Who are we curing? Why? I suppose the thought is if it comes for one of us—that is, a human—it can come for any of us. There was a thought from one man that perhaps it infected people who had previous surgeries. Maybe they were weaker and more susceptible. Someone seemed to think that would make them more of a candidate to fix, because then their body was more fungible. Is that really true though? It seems like lore all the way down, madness commenting on madness.

August 20

2am- Made a minor breakthrough today. Can’t write in here, need to go back to the lab.

4:30am- Going to bed. Will try to write tomorrow.

August 22

Obviously I left it for a few days. What can I do but laugh? We did it. We figured out the specs of the saw, the technology to make it nearly infinitely small. Now we have to figure out the physics—how to get it to move in the way we need, to cut at the time we want it to. Mechanisms and movement. The two hard m’s. Qiang was helpful. We really got going after we figured it out, rechecking numbers and hashing it out, testing out theories on each other for what was to come. I think it was a major breakthrough after a minor one. Good sign.

August 23

Slow day. We presented our findings to C who had some doubts, but he was ultimately on board for a test run soon.

September 1

Well it was a bust. I should’ve known. We’re back to size again after thinking we knew how to do it. One good thing though, I’ve had more time to talk to Mira.

She came over to my hut a few nights ago, must have heard how badly we’d fucked it up. She wanted to talk about her work at first and then realized I was wincing. Wincing. I don’t know about that but that’s what she said. I told her I was fine. Besides it was good to hear about her research. She didn’t tell me anything real or important—just some vague stats, some equations she was working on with her team.

“I didn’t know you were the head of your team,” I said.

M laughed at me.

“You really are just a pretty face,” she said. “You haven’t done any recon have you? About the others?”

I said I didn’t know why I would. She dragged me out of the room by my hands, ending any possible flirtation and taking me out onto the beach. We made our way through the undergrowth into the moonlight. The sand was incredibly soft. I wasn’t expecting it. “Virginal,” M joked. I almost asked if she was but I thought better of it. Thank G-d I was sober.

“Were you raised religious?” I asked.

“A little. I read some of the Upanishads and Vedas when I was a kid. But my mom liked telling stories more. Things from the Ramayana or Mahabharata.”

“I’ve never read them,” I said.

She laughed. I liked making her laugh even if I didn’t know why.

“You don’t always have to reveal your ignorance.”

Nothing else happened that night. We went back to our own beds. I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. I thought about watching porn, but didn’t. Wondered if I could talk to C about calling someone onto the island but by the morning, drenched in cold sweat and guilt, I decided not to.

When I was really young—and I have no memory of this—my grandma tried to come and take me away from my mom. She said I was possessed by a dybbuk. That I was already acting like a psychopath. No one told me until I was eighteen. My mom let it slip late one night when she had a few too many glasses of wine. My dad wasn’t there for some reason. She clung to him like a shadow, but not then. Not when she told me.

September 5

We’ve been busy again. Keep hitting on something close to the right equation to keep everything together when it comes—but not quite. Just not quite. It’s incredibly frustrating. Qiang keeps telling me we’ll get there. Mira doesn’t say anything. Still won’t tell me what she’s working on. Christian says we should get something up and running before XA comes. He’s stressed. He’s not good at hiding it. I think that C would like to envision himself as a wizard, but he’s kind of a klutz. He falls, he stubs his toe, he doesn’t really seem to get the math as much as the rest of us. He’s supposed to be keeping us in check but when he comes over to look at our whiteboards he just nods and says “Good, good… keep going.” As if he doesn’t understand any of it. Don’t understand why they, whoever they are, would pick him to spearhead the whole thing. I’m not saying it should be me I just know I could do better. That’s the whole thing: even when I’m not firing on all cylinders I know that I’m better than the rest. Except M. I’m not sure what her deal is. She finally told me a little more about what she does but it doesn’t make sense in the greater scheme of things. She’s creating a chemical compound from horseshoe crab blood. I said there weren’t any horseshoe crabs around that I knew of. She smiled and took me to a little lagoon that was crawling with the little beasts.

“C thinks we can find another way to heal the infection.”

“Their blood?”

“Yes. We already use it in some medicine.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Hopefully you’ll never need it,” she said.

I hope she’s right. I hope the work we’re doing is all in vain.

September 14

We have a date now. October 3. Soon. XA will dock and we’ll show them what we’ve done with their investment.

October 2

They arrived this morning. A day ahead of schedule. I haven’t written because we’ve been too busy. We have a prototype. We think the equations work. Enough. I don’t think it will be as exact as the specs call for but I think the loss of blood will be minimal to the subject. We haven’t seen what they brought with them yet. A dog? A cow? A bat? I’m not sure. C knows. I’m sure of it. But he won’t tell us. Mira has been under wraps too. More like underwater. Every time I see her she’s furrowing her brow. I think she’s worried. But there’s a part of me that thinks if she can find a chemical solution we should focus on that instead. A nano-saw is… Not that I don’t think we can do it. We were just so far away at the beginning. There’s so many problems we don’t know we’ll encounter. I want to be optimistic. I am optimistic. We will deliver the project tomorrow.

October 3

Notes on Subject:

-A small dog. A terrier maybe? They say they have three infected subjects. We will test our work on each.

-The saw went in with almost no visible blood. Q says a good sign.

-The imaging shows a puncture in the lung caused by a growth. A thorn? Impossible.

-XA is represented by three men in suits. Silent. They watch the surgery closely. We manage to get the thorn removed from the lung and then go in to repair the pneumothorax. Dog dies in process. (I am not the surgeon. If I was, maybe the dog wouldn’t have died.)

Notes on Subject 2:

-A surprise. Another. A few hours later. This time a cow. A larger canvas.

-This time the cow was growing two wings out of its back. Again, impossible. This feels so Biblical. “The adversaries of the LORD shall be broken to pieces; against them he will thunder in heaven. The LORD will judge the ends of the earth.” We are weeping in his silence.

-Q looked over my shoulder so I’m starting a new page. Warning.

-Massive bleeding out. The wings have deeper roots than we thought from the scan. A thin, thin line down towards the cow’s heart. Massive rupture. Two surgeons going in.

-The cow almost lived, but at the last minute one of the two doctors nicked his heart.

“Let’s take a break.”

Notes on Final Subject:

-What the fuck

-No. No. Okay.

-C brought in his kid. A human subject.

-There’s so much blood. Something went wrong, somewhere in his skull something burst. Q is trying to help the on-call surgeon find the source of the bleeding. The two horns were connected to his brain stem somehow. We weren’t precise enough at all.

-Crimson just flowing from his eye sockets. Why?

-His eyes are hanging from two filaments, just dangling…

-C is crying. Yelling. Screaming. M is trying to calm him down, give him a sedative but he’s refusing.

-There’s nothing to be done. We failed this child. The tech isn’t ready and XA is going to withdraw. C is hysterical like a mother.

-God’s plan, C says a few hours later. We sit in silence.

***

After a few days of confused silence, Christian told the assembled team they would not be shutting down. He was going to start pouring in his own money. Levi didn’t know how to take it. He felt it was ridiculous for XA to withdraw in the first place. This was their pet project. Mira said she was out. She couldn’t stand it. Levi shot her a confused look that was meant to signal more than it ever possibly could.

            Project Nazareth was entering a new phase and no one knew if it would yield anything. Of course their leader wanted to make sense of the senseless. They all did. But mourning had to give way to something new and this felt like more of the same, a protracted recklessness rather than a rebirth. But that was what Christian said over and over as he ranted and raved. “Nothing has changed. The plan is the same,” he said. Mira left in the middle of the night, no goodbyes. Qiang kept stealing glances at Levi, the fearful furtive kind, like they were working for a mad scientist now rather than a controlled surgical expert. Levi always knew the end result of this was madness. At best, a new plague, at worst, death. Senseless ruptures and blood pouring out of eye sockets in front of them. The sheer volume of liquid had surprised him. He wasn’t a real surgeon, that was true, but it seemed excessive. There was something about the new attachments that was bizarre, to him at least, they were using their host’s blood supply. They changed things inside the body’s system. What exactly they were changing remained to be seen.

            Levi tried to keep his head down and work. He started drinking after work with Qiang. Whiskey, Miller High Life, whatever they got from the main island. They didn’t cross the water very often. Christian moped whenever they left and he wouldn’t go himself.

            As the months passed, Christian continued to debase himself. He was quiet. Never mentioned his kid. Complained about headaches. Started yelling at everyone to keep working, to push the project further. Even though XA had withdrawn he continued to find funding in strange places, a hodgepodge of new age weirdos, fringe scientists, and Cassadaga mediums. The rations the crew was given turned more and more simple. Some of the people Levi used to see around the island vanished overnight—presumably they quit without notice. He understood. It was a grim project. The birthplace of a new kind of death.

            Follow the chutes and ladders. Each week Levi thought he drew closer to the source of the equations that haunted his dreams. An ouroboros, he told Christian.

            “There’s no end and no beginning.”

            “It’s just math,” Christian snapped. “Figure it out.”

            They kept eating in silence for a while until Levi asked Christian what he thought was even doing.

            “You know,” he said. “For the cause.”

            “Are you not taking this seriously? Do you not see where this is going?”

            “I understand we’re fighting a disease, one that is imminent, yes. And we’re doing everything we can. But you’ve already driven at least three scientists away and your own child—”

“Don’t.”

            Qiang walked into the little lunchroom. He walked over and sat between them. Didn’t say a word, just made the space. They needed to know they were being watched, that civility still ruled.

A new countdown started. Just as soon as they’d gotten XA off their backs, Christian convinced them to come back to the island. A new trial by fire. A new crucifixion. The shadowy figures only gave two weeks notice, though apparently Christian had been begging them to come back for quite some time.

            Their leader had taken to posting little notices on their lab doors. He was rarely appearing in public anymore. When the mad scientist did, he berated them on their progress. Said they had to make up for lost time and lost bodies.

            Levi wanted to contact Mira. The loss of her body felt the most painful. The curves, the sweetness, her dusky gravel-filled voice. The timbre of it turned him on in retrospect. At night she was the one he thought of, not any of the sex workers he used to hire or ex-girlfriends. They all became one mush of pussy but his peer was different. He wanted to call her. Find her number somehow and tell her to come back, just for a visit. That was unlucky. She was probably right to leave when she did—Christian was only going to get worse. But he was going down with the ship too. This was an insane opportunity. One that would likely not recur. There was no one to tell really, no one would believe him. He hardly believed his own eyes. Mira would understand.

            The young egotist walked over to Qiang’s lab to check up on him. The visitation was happening in less than a week. Qiang was playing a Talking Heads CD and drinking a beer while eating some leftover noodles. The lead singer screamed and wailed about power lines as Levi sat down on a rickety chair.

            “How’s it going?”

            Qiang shrugged.

            “What?”

            “I’m worried about Christian. I don’t think this is a good idea.”

            “Sure but… isn’t it what he hired us for?”

            “Yes…” Qiang trailed off. “But still.”

            Flies buzzed around the small wooden hut. A lantern blinked above them. On a desk were dozens of notepads and books, journals and notations. Levi remembered how he’d kept a journal for a while too—until the death. Then it all seemed futile. Better not to remember.

            “I think we should get Mira to come back.”

            Qiang coughed up his noodles, somewhere between shock and laughter.

            “She’s not coming back.”

            “Why?”

            “The kid? Not to mention…”

            Levi arched an eyebrow, just enough to signal his interest.

            “You don’t know?”

            “I don’t know if I don’t know because you’re not saying anything yet.”

            “One of the other scientists… made advances.”

            A gut punch.

            “Did she say who…?”

            “Yeah,” Qiang said, “one of the other guys who left along with her. Ryan or something.”

            “Ryan,” Levi said, tasting the name in his mouth. “Fuck.” So it wasn’t him she was worried about. That was good at least.

            “I mean she was one of the two women here so… I guess something was bound to happen.”

            “Did she say what happened?”

            Qiang shook his head and took another slurp of his food.

            “Do you have a way to contact her?”

            “No. I don’t. I wish I did.”

            “Okay,” Levi said. “I’ll leave you to your meal in peace.”

            As he walked back through the brush, he heard a piercing cry. There wasn’t any large beast immediately around him but still he hurried back to the dwelling he called home for the past few months. Still, the cawing continued. A flock of angry birds. Something annoying but harmless. No weapon formed against me shall prosper and every tongue that rises against me in judgement shall be condemned.

He sent three messages the next morning. One to the rabbi, one to Mira, and one to the sex worker in Key West. Christian helped. He thought it was an incredible plan—if it worked.

            “You’re sure?”

            “Of course,” Levi said. “I always am.”

            “We have the capabilities, it’s just a matter of certainty.”

            “I can do it.”

            “You’re sure you have it nailed down…”

            “Yes.”

Cheerleaders lined the laboratory. His two weeks were up. Time for the big show. The nutty Kabbalah rabbi, Mira, and some girl alongside the esteemed members of XA. Christian was whispering to the scientists. No one was close enough to listen in. Qiang stood in position, waiting for the next step in the process. He’d followed along closely, had a dozen conversations with Levi but still worried the little stunt wouldn’t work. If they had multiple plans of attack, maybe, but Levi was hedging his bets on his new-found skill. He thought he was the Messiah, God’s gift to the experimental medical community.

            Levi entered with the first test subject.

            “Redux time,” Qiang said under his breath.

            Christian shot him a look as if to say that was in poor taste, and it was. He knew that. But so was all of this. They should’ve just gone home. Something about the way Levi had talked last night, his voice racing over every word like he was on speed. But they knew each other, this was just what he was like when he got excited. When he thought he was conquering death. Grim to realize that, to remember what they were doing, Qiang thought. Trying to stop the reaper’s quiet wrath.

            Levi was decked out in a surgical gown and slim white mask. A black cap over his small head, wielding protractors.

            “Hello everyone,” he started. “Don’t worry, we have two surgeons on hand. But this isn’t all for show.” Mira looked nervous. He looked her in the eyes as he talked. It didn’t take that much money to get the three of them in the room, but he was going to enjoy his money’s worth. The rabbi and the girl looked skittish. They wouldn’t meet his eye. Probably thought he was mad. He was. “I will be performing the surgery,” he said, gazing down at the rabbit on the operating table. “It’s important I think we acknowledge why we failed last time. It should’ve been one of us up here operating the nano-saw we made, not one of the surgeons. In a way,” he laughed, “I am the one true surgeon. The inventor. It’s harder to work something after being taught secondhand. Of course, if something goes wrong, they’ll step in. We also won’t be operating on a child.” He knew that he had to appeal to his shareholders if he wanted to usurp Christian’s place in the company. To be Christian he had to be a believer. Calm, collected, cool, charismatic. The last part was the hardest. Levi was a natural asshole. Even he knew, at least when he was lucid.

            The first surgery began. This time it went off without a hitch. Almost no blood at all. Just the tiniest dribble of crimson left on table. It took just a few minutes. Everyone clapped. It was a quick show, almost a trick of the light. Everyone had been very careful. There could be no mistakes, so there weren’t. Levi smiled behind his mask.

            “How,” one of the men from XA asked, “did you get ahold of specimen with the Angel Disease?”

            “Great question. Christian? Do you want to field this one or should I?”

            Christina was shaking as he stammered out something about variants.

            “You may know that there are variants. If you don’t, you will soon,” Levi took over. It was strange, this confidence coursing through his body. “Christian has some side experiments. Things he told me about after you left. One of them is a little… a little zoo. Where he tests how contagious the Angel Disease, or Diseases, really are. We know less than we think. It seems to be something akin to the common cold. We don’t know exactly how it spreads but it does. Not everyone around will get it, but almost like it’s hereditary, it mutates those around it. Inspires similar growth. Human evolution gone cancerous. Maladaptive.”

            Mira nodded at him. He moved on.

            “So when the previous subjects were here, Christian put them in the zoo. These new subjects resulted from the contamination.”

            “So we could all be… infected?” Qiang said.

            “Unlikely. It rarely jumps to humans.”

            “But it did,” the man from XA said. “Last time we were here there was… a human subject.”

            “Yes,” Levi replied. “It’s horrible. But that child wasn’t so far gone. We could’ve… if the nano tech was where it is now, we might… might have been able to save him.” Christian was hysterical now. They couldn’t meet each other’s eyes.

            “We won’t be practicing on a kid,” Levi said, “but Christian has brought me what we needed to work on the most. Someone who has been completely taken over by the Angel Disease.”

            “Excuse me?” The man scoffed.

            “Please,” Levi said to the surgeons.

            “Levi?” Qiang said. “What is this?”

            “I didn’t want to implicate you.”

            “Where the fuck is this zoo?” Mira said, coming over now, frightened by the possibility of escalating nefarious deeds.

            “Downstairs. Just below us,” Levi replied. “Can we clear Christian?”

            “You mean… take him outside?” Qiang asked.

            “Yes.”

            “Sure, I’ll do it.”

            Once they were outside, the surgeons brought in something nearly indescribable.

            “Our angel,” Levi said.

            No one else saw salvation. They saw terror. It stomped in on two feet, wings bursting out of scabby pink skin. Dirt and grime all over its hide, horns and warts and boils. Like something out of a Medieval plague.

            “What the fuck…” Thalia said. “Why the hell did you bring us here? To see this?”

            “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “We will do what we can to save the beast. This was once a pig. A little one that ran around—that’s what Christian told me anyway.” Levi was going to show them he could kill a messenger of God’s wrath. He was the Tzadik. He had come.

            The surgeons used chains to lug the daemon to the table where they used tranquilizers, struggling to penetrate its horn-covered hide. The steely scales wouldn’t allow for most needles. Special-order. All thanks to Christian before his lunacy devolved.

            Once the creature slumbered, Levi stepped up and touched two of the nano-saws, so small no one could even see them. He walked back over to a little control panel with a camera. That was the whole point, part of what had gone wrong before—the camera’s accuracy lagged, the curvature of the saw was off. Too many mistakes, too many things getting nicked that shouldn’t have. It’s a delicate area after all.

            Everyone watched the saw winding through the organs of the pig-creature. The rabbi got up as if to leave but Levi stopped to give him a look.

            “Pay attention,” the man from XA yelled.

            Levi smiled like a ghoul and got back to work. There was no point of course. This thing was too far gone, transmogrified into a pustule of puss and thorn. But he cut the horns out from the nervous system—or at least a few of them. They’d spread all over, changed the pig’s natural DNA.

            When he finally stopped and looked at his small crowd, they were astonished. He almost bowed. Then he turned around, whipped out a bigger surgical saw and started hacking off the wings. Whole. Blood poured out, the nodules were little horns connected to the very fungal-looking wings. They were limbs. Useless. Couldn’t do anything. The stench was awful. Everyone gasped. Mira and Thalia walked out. The rabbi grimaced. But the man from XA was pleased. When Levi brought a portion of the wing over to him, he took it.

            “I think the infection continues to mutate. Wings are its natural end point. That’s why you call it the angel disease, isn’t it? Well. I found a way to stop it. If we catch it early enough.”

            “Yes,” the man said. “You did.”

            Levi locked eyes with the rabbi. The old man stopped in front of the young one. The idealist waited for a compliment, to have proven the mage wrong. Instead, he spit in Levi’s face and walked off without saying a word. Such hostility. When the judgement came, he would not be lenient to the elite. Pay day had to come eventually.

∩

Grace Byron is a writer from the Midwest based in Queens. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Granta, The Paris Review, GQ, The Nation, The New Republic, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue, among other outlets. Find her @emotrophywife. Herculine is her debut novel.