The Lord of Opium

He didn’t really want to die. The closer he got to the pits, the more foolish the trip seemed, yet he kept on. He wanted to know how far he could push this death wish. At a certain point he sat on the ground and thought, I’m not really like Cienfuegos. I left the country, and he can’t do that. I can love. I love María. This made him feel better. He didn’t have to kill himself to prove he was free.

One worrisome thing remained, though: the voice in his head. Celia thought he was possessed. Cienfuegos believed that he really was El Patrón come back from the dead. So did Sor Artemesia, but she said that he had a chance to be different.

“And I do,” Matt said aloud. He stood up and shaded his eyes as he gazed at the polluted pits not far away. The ground was covered in sheets of the same light-sensitive plastic he’d seen at the mushroom greenhouse. A person was tending them, lifting sheets to examine what lay beneath and spraying water from a large hose. The smell wasn’t nearly as bad as Matt remembered. He went closer.

It was a woman. She wore a white hazmat suit that must have been hot. Her face was flushed and angry. Her heavy boots came halfway up to her knees. The purposeful way she moved told Matt that she wasn’t an eejit. Every now and then she stopped, kicked a stone, and swore a blue streak.

“Fiona?” he said.

She looked up and cursed again. “You did this to me, you pile of eejit droppings! Is this the kind of job for someone who got an A in her A-levels? Who kept the hospital going when all the doctors and nurses buggered off to that party? Served them right to get poisoned. Self-centered duckwits! And didn’t I save your life when you got sick? Oh, but nobody cares for Fiona. She’s expendable.”

“Fiona,” said Matt again. “What are you doing?”

“As if you don’t know! Cienfuegos said he would cockroach me if I didn’t work here. He means it too, the bludger. He’s got evil, cold eyes like a snake.”

Matt barely noticed the smell of the pits, he was so surprised by Fiona’s behavior. “I can’t help you if I don’t know what you’re doing,” he said.

The woman stopped and scowled at him. “It’s perfectly clear, isn’t it? I’m tending these ghastly mycelia. They eat filth and they are filth, just strings of rot as far as I can see. The whole place smells like toilet.”

Well, it was a job, Matt decided. Cienfuegos had kept his word. Fiona was alive and where she couldn’t do mischief. “Are you getting fed?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. Prison rations, not that I can stomach it after eight hours of this. I get a bloody cot in one of those new eejit pens. If I want a shower, it’s all in together with the zombies, watching them soap themselves in unison.”

Matt, in spite of her crimes, felt sorry for her. “I’ll see that you get your own cottage,” he said, and then, rashly, he said, “Fiona, are you microchipped?”

She appeared to swell up with rage. “You’ve got a lot of cheek saying I’m an eejit. I don’t stumble around like a drunk on Saturday night, thank you very much. You need an eye exam.”

“There are other kinds of control, things so subtle you can’t see them. Like wanting to do something and discovering you can’t.”

Fiona turned pale. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did you have any injections when you arrived?”

“We all had immunizations, didn’t we? For the exotic diseases.” She seemed to deflate before his eyes.

“Of course. That’s all it was,” said Matt, unwilling to push the issue. “I’ll tell Cienfuegos to find you a cottage.” He left her standing by the pits. She didn’t move until he was a long way off.

He got the horse and rode on toward the oasis. A few sandhill cranes were huddled in the shady part of the water, panting in the heat. Once there had been thousands of them, but only a few hundred had survived the summers. They moved from pool to pool, seeking coolness.

Matt sat under the collapsing grape arbor and drank some of the water he carried with him. He pulled off his left shoe and looked at the bottom of his foot. The dark line Listen had discovered had always been there, but Matt had never looked at it closely.

Yet he wasn’t as worried here as he’d been outside. Something about the place made him feel safe. He looked around at the rocks enclosing the old campsite on three sides. The fourth side was the lake.