The trees were rioting and the air stank of blood. Harding covered his nose with both hands and leaned forward, eyes closed, from his cross-legged position in the doorway. The noise of the street faded and swelled in a soft roar like ocean waves. Gigantic and wild and heavy with humidity, the wind tossed the heads of the trees into a frightening blue sky, and the cacophony of screaming children rose distantly from the park across the street.

Laughter assaulted Harding’s ears. Two women in red dresses entered a parked car, and he could feel their presence bore into the private sanctuary behind his eyes. Why did they have to be right there in front of him, throwing their words as though he were a target, a horseshoe post damned to the clang of their voices? These women were sending signals again, and he heard their voices dimly in his head, deriding him, calling him a liar and a thief. Ignore, he told himself. Invisiblize them.

The doorway was his afternoon place. It was a good spot for watching the activities in the park, particularly the female agents and their robot children. The women sat in groups on the benches, speaking in code. He would have moved closer to decrypt their language, but he was afraid of the children–their noise, their frantic activity, the way their jarring movements seemed controlled by the women’s forces.

No one entered this doorway because the office was empty. Plate glass windows opened on a scene of aggressive disarray. A dismantled counter. Scattered chairs. A desk on its side. A tangle of wires and half torn up blue carpet. Harding no longer looked through the window, preferring only to lean his tired back against the glass door. Although the scene made him uneasy, he was not afraid of destruction that was displayed so openly–it was the secret, insidious kind that terrified him. He’d had enough biology in college to know how annihilation began, how by diffusion it seeped through the semi-permeable membrane of his skin.

The blood smell clouded his nostrils again. Perhaps all the women in this city were menstruating. It was either blood or a strong perfume odor they gave off, pheromones of warning that his heightened senses picked up. His olfactory abilities seemed to have grown more and more acute these days, like an animal’s, and he could hear the women’s voices in that dark territory above and behind his ears where the magnetic energy radiated from the chip the CIA had planted in his cerebral cortex. He thought of his mother, a wraith in a dark dress, who had raised him herself after his father died. She left him alone for hours every day while she worked at the laundromat, and gripped him with her long painted nails as she forbade him to leave the house.

She’d let the CIA operate on his brain one night as he lay sleeping thirteen years ago, when he was fifteen. That’s when it had started–the shrouded buzz in his brain, the ways girls looked at him as though they were frightened of some power he had. But it had taken him the past five years to realize the chip was part of a plan to usurp his power. It explained how he’d always felt, how others treated him. Now he knew his life’s great struggle depended on his determination not to be controlled by forces beyond himself. To succumb to fear would only add to his susceptibility to CIA influence, the powerful agency that could turn human flesh to plastic and self-direction to robotic conformity.

There was once a female agent in high school whose face he’d touched–the velvet feel of a firm peach in the soft darkness of his mother’s Buick. Then the slap stinging his cheek. Her sharp eyes seared across the years. Harding felt a chill as he recalled her. She was like the women in the park, their codes floating across his ears. How they laughed. The menace of their crossing legs. The agonizing bounce of their breasts. They would torture him slowly, like meat roasting on a spit.

“I am a man with the strength of ten.” Harding’s own voice startled him. The sentence was a response to something someone had said in his head, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He said it again, his voice fierce: “I am a man with the strength of ten.”

He found that sometimes, if he talked out loud, the things women were saying in his head would go away. He knew people watched him, but his attempts to defeat their forces took all the energy he could muster, and he couldn’t worry about appearances.

“Can’t hurt you, they can’t,” he whispered. “Reactions not indicated in this particular instance.” But as soon as he stopped talking, the voices came right back: “Loser. Fuck you. You really ought to off yourself.”

“Can I help you, sir?”

Harding jerked. A woman in a brown pantsuit stood before him. He startled, not from the sudden interference of a real voice, but because the sight of her eclipsed everything else–her giant face, the teeth too bright, eyes drilling. He stared, his vision zooming closer and then receding. His heart leaped in his chest, like a dog throwing itself against a cage.

“I’m Karen Hotchkiss, social worker for the Reach Out program. We’re helping homeless people get the care and services they need. If you qualify, you could receive medical treatment, shelter and food.”

Harding felt instantly self-conscious. He looked down at his worn, grimy jeans, the dirt so ground in that the denim was a shiny black. His winter coat, little protection against the assault of noise and summer heat, had frayed cuffs and a zipper that jammed. He knew his beard was long and thick, caked with bits of food and saliva.

This woman looked alternately familiar and strange; her brunette hair, like his mother’s, tugged against her face in the hot breeze. Perhaps this woman was his mother in disguise.

The woman’s words came again from a great distance. “Can you tell me your name?”

“You already know my name,” he said sharply.

The woman shrugged, smiled. “I’m sorry, I don’t. It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me.”

Harding looked at her warily, pulling his coat tightly around his chest.

“You seem frightened–don’t be. I won’t bite.” Her smile overshadowed the horizon.

“What is it you want?” he said. “Exactly. Tell me exactly.” His question was a test–he could gauge the sincerity of her concern by her reply, by the way she held her shoulders and poured the stifling liquid of her so-called good intentions out the holes of her eyes.

“I’d like to spend some time with you. Get to know you a little. Find out if there is anything you need.”

Need. Need. What was that word? Knead. Kneed. Like bread. Like a kick in the crotch.

“You look like an intelligent man. I bet you’ve had some college.”

College. College. Collage. Collar. Collarage. She’d chain him like a dog. The chip buzzed quietly in his brain, just below his ragged hairline. But his voice responded, independent of his mind. “Graduated,” he said proudly. “Top scores. Biology. One plus one equals three.”

“My! What a difficult field!”

“Graduated. Yes I did.” That had been in a day before he discovered the chip, when his life seemed easy because of his ignorance. But he couldn’t understand why his voice was telling the social worker these things. Surely she’d use this information against him. Oddly, he wanted to tell her more, but he closed his lips around any further leakage, knowing there was great danger in letting this woman slip her poison in. She was controlling what he said, what he thought. He began shaking his head.

“Perhaps we could have coffee,” the social worker said. “There’s a shop down the street–my treat.” Why was she smiling? He knew that smile. The code for murder masquerading as kindness.

“But it’s okay here, if you’d prefer. I don’t mind. May I sit beside you?”

This was too much. His heart clenched. He felt like running. But she had hemmed him in. She guarded the doorway. Maybe he could dart out between her brown pantlegs. She smelled of blood. “Go,” he said. He hid his eyes in his hands, covered his mouth. “No. Go.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll leave you alone. Maybe we can talk later, when you feel better. I’ll leave you this flier.”

The blood-red nails held out the paper. He hesitated, shocked by their length, then snatched the flier, knowing that if he ignored it, she would only stay longer to force it on him. He crumpled it against his face to hide himself. The sharp Xerox smell made him dizzy.

When he looked up, she had gone. He unwrinkled the paper, his heart pounding. The large block letters arrested his vision.

 

REACH OUT WANTS TO HELP YOU LIVE A BETTER LIFE

MEDICAL SERVICES. ASSISTANCE WITH PAPERWORK.

SOCIAL SECURITY APPLICATIONS.

JOB APPLICATIONS. FOOD STAMPS.

SHELTER. CLOTHING. IF YOU QUALIFY.

CALL 556-7659 OR VISIT WITH US

AT 1016 JACKSON.

STOP IN FOR FREE COFFEE AND DONUTS

Harding frowned and balled up the paper again, then stuck it in his coat pocket. He would save it as evidence of the CIA plot he had exposed. Then everyone would know of his battle to preserve his personal freedom, the freedom of all people.

His afternoon place had been invaded. Maybe he would have to find another. He rose unsteadily and hunched his thick coat against the hot summer wind and the sun’s piercing rays, moving uncertainly down the street as the crowd parted before him. It was clear they knew what had happened, that their worlds had nearly plummeted into chaos because of how close that woman had come to him.

 

His evening place was four blocks away, a tunnel under the railroad tracks with a sidewalk on one side for pedestrians. Amid the broken glass and soot, Harding sat in his usual spot–twelve sidewalk squares in. Twelve–the “one” was for solidarity. “Two” was for union. In the dim air, the orange glow from the sinking sun flamed at the tunnel’s end. If he followed it, it would burn him alive.

His evenings were usually peaceful despite the cars roaring through the underpass. Although sometimes he was subjected to lone passersby, they always stepped around him with nothing to say. They seemed to recognize that this was his realm, and that they were trespassing on his exclusive world. Here, there were no women to shriek their laughter in his direction or talk in codes he could not decipher.

He took an almond out of his pocket. He was down to almonds now. Three a day, which he’d found in an open bag in the park. Someone had been feeding the squirrels.

He needed so little to sustain him. A week ago, it was one hot dog a day, bought from a vendor back when he’d found a twenty outside the ATM. Then it was down to a piece of bread from a loaf discarded behind the bakery. Then the almonds. His strength seemed to be increasing though, his mind more powerful, more alert. And his vision had become much sharper–he could see colorful atoms floating in the air like a diaphanous curtain. The hunger was gone, replaced by a small, furry sensation in his stomach, like a small animal sleeping there.

Harding ate the dinner almond in tiny bites, not swallowing until the entire nut was in his mouth. He felt the pieces slide down his esophagus; the peristaltic action began in his gut. He let his breath out slowly, but the cilia in his lungs clenched in a cough.

“I made you do that,” a woman’s voice said. Damn them! He looked around, but no one was near. He twisted his neck to free himself from the haunting words.

He summoned all his strength.

“I will destroy you!” His shout echoed hollowly in the tunnel. “You cannot defeat me!”

But as soon as he spoke, defeat overcame him, a strong, almost painful sensation rising in his chest like a balloon. Tears started in his eyes, but he clamped his jaws to stop their flow. He knew what regret brought, what harm was in it. What harm was here, out in the world, if he relaxed his vigil against it.

The social worker. What was her name? Karen Concern? Karen Hot Lips? He remembered the flier and pulled it out, looked at the words again. He began to tear the paper carefully, strip by strip, isolating the words. MEDICAL SERVICES. He put the line of words in his mouth, chewing on the woody taste, the bitter black ink. The flier tasted pasty, old, like parchment.

FOOD STAMPS. This was food. Hadn’t people sustained themselves on sawdust? He saw the trees fighting the wind, felled by angry saws and chewed up by the maw of a shrieking machine. He put the word in his mouth.

SHELTER. Didn’t he have shelter enough? His private doorway. His evening spot here in the tunnel. The image of confining walls struck him between his eyes, and the smell of blood curled around his nose again.

At last he tore apart the opening phrase, which he’d saved for last because the words were more frightening, more difficult to understand.

REACH OUT. HELP. A BETTER LIFE.

A woman’s voice screeched in his head as the letters stood out. Why would he reach out for help if living a better life meant unawareness? Ignorance? Complacency?

The colored curtain of atoms faded to the pale yellow walls and heavy iron doors of a hospital where he’d been several years ago. He remembered how the other inhabitants were so isolated from each other, how they screamed at night. He recalled the piercing calls of the nurses and tasted the pills they’d forced on him, how they’d deadened his mind to the dim haze of cigarette smoke in the crowded dayroom.

He would never go back there, where they’d tried to subdue him into a half-life of surrender and resignation. That was what the CIA wanted. But he knew too much now. The chip they had planted could no longer control him, lure him with the promises of a better life.

He swallowed the last bit of paper, his hands shaking as he fed himself. The dimness of evening began to expand. He lay down, pulled his coat around him, and thought of the female CIA agents, how they’d plagued him, how the magnetized chip had been so difficult to defy. But one day he would dissolve it. One day the women would give up. And his strength would amaze and humble all of them.

 

<span”>Zan Bockes (pronounced “Bacchus”) earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. Her work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Cutbank and Phantasmagoria, including three Pushcart Prize nominations.