Quorum

By Jackie Neel

AUGUST 15TH, 2016. 8:16 P.M.:

Why isn’t he crying? Why aren’t I?

I can’t pace around the kitchen without stepping in the puddle I refuse to glimpse, so I slump back in the plastic patio chair I keep at the table and stare at the twirling ceiling fan. Asher tugs at my skirt, babbling a little, but not crying.

I don’t have the grit to pull the pistol’s trigger two more times to make a clean job of it.

Asher, dear Asher. I look into his eyes, the color of Lake Michigan, and it is more calming than being on the shore at South Haven. I remember him just after he was born, when I held him to my breast.

I don’t want to kill him, which means that I must.

June 21st, 2016:

I’m at an eight. I snarled at woman at the park for walking too slowly on the trail. She had to have been seventy. I bared my teeth like a mad dog. A power couple jogging the other way with their Akita tutted at me, but the woman just stared at me with her wide eyes and her pale face. I wanted to knock her dentures out, but I raced on. After I left them all behind I noticed my fists were clinched so tight that my palms were bloody. I’ll have to start keeping my nails short.

I’m supposed to list my stressors now. I can’t think of any. Katerina is picking up Asher from day care this very minute, and both are lovely. Work is going great— my friends in the NIH say that my grant application is progressing through assessment well. My faculty startup funds are holding out, and it looks like I’ll land Patricia, the star second-year grad student in the department. She already did a rotation on drug resistant bacteria. I think I’ll start her on biofilms.

If it weren’t for old biddies in the park who can’t move their shit, I’d say things are going great. Maybe this audio journal will help my temper issues. Dr. Rickova says that the act of writing is therapeutic, but I know myself, and I’m more likely to keep up with it if I can just jabber into my phone.

June 25th, 2016:

Dr. Rickova says exercise, exercise, exercise. That’s the key to beating stress. I guess he’s on to something, because I’m really digging this running. I’ve always scoffed at the idea of a runner’s high, but I get it now—when I’m not moving, or lifting weights, or doing Pilates, I feel antsy. When my muscles are working, I feel primo. Maybe working out will finally get some of this three-year-old baby weight off of me.

Rickova still won’t prescribe me anything good. He says the benzodiazepines are all too dangerous, and besides aren’t targeted for anger. Of course, he also doesn’t really think it’s anger. He thinks it’s a form of social anxiety. The wanker.

Anyway, I’m on some generic-name SSRI that comes out dirt cheap with my insurance. Great, I guess, but I wish he’d give me a heavy hitter.

It turns out that Patricia has an aunt with cystic fibrosis. That’s why she wants to study Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which infects the lungs, especially of cystic fibrosis patients. That matches my research aims perfectly, and it never hurts to have a personal story to sell your work.

I’m going running. I’m crossing my fingers that I don’t uppercut a nun or anything.

July 1st, 2016:

I’m hiding in my car in the parking garage downtown. Fifteen minutes ago, I ran over a guy at Meijer.

It was the crowds, of course, jostling each other for bottles of pop and TVs. Dr. Rickova says there’s no such thing as social rage. You can have anger issues, and you can have social anxiety, but they’re separate issues. Whenever I’m in a crowded place, I can feel humanity laying siege to the walls of my mind. I just want to lash out and beat them all bloody until I’m alone in an empty circle of knocked-over shelves and crap made in China.

I left my basket in the store, the pre-roasted chicken and the gallon of milk weren’t worth the wait in the lines the way I was feeling. I made a run for the parking lot.

I was trying to back out. The city bus had showed up twenty feet from me, dumping its load of retirees on the stoop, when a redneck in a hunting vest stopped right behind my car to dig for something in his pockets, probably his phone. Why does a hick need a cell phone, anyway?

I was at a nine, at least. His dumb camo hat seemed to glow in my mind with a red flashing light.

I kicked it into reverse and floored it. The thump on my Subaru’s lift gate was satisfying, and the look on his face in the mirror as he scrambled away limping was delicious.

I don’t think I’ll tell Dr. Rickova about that one. I pulled through the row of parked cars and drove away, and I don’t think they saw my tags. I hope not. Anyway, best not to get Dr. Rickova calling the police.

Long story short, I need to take something stronger.

July 5th, 2016:

Well, I’ve dropped another size. I wouldn’t recommend homicidal mania as a diet plan, but it sure is effective. I’ve never had a skinny frame, but now I look down and see things firm and toned that have never looked like that. Katerina has certainly noticed. Maybe the mom-in-law will take Asher Friday night.

July 10th, 2016:

Liz did agree to take Asher, and Katerina pulled out all the stops for a romantic evening out. She wore a slinky forest-green cocktail dress, and I struggled to find a dress in my closet that flattered my improving physique. I went with the blue spaghetti-strapped princess cut to show off my toned arms, but I wish I had time to have it altered. I should have planned ahead.

We started with drinks at Vinology. It was early yet, so it wasn’t too crowded. The alcohol seemed to ooze into my head and pool into the cracks between my crushed-glass thoughts.

The evening air was so cool, it started to make me drunker than the wine did. I wanted to pull Katerina into a cab back to our place, or maybe to a hotel, but I knew she’d be devastated if we didn’t see everything she had planned.

The centerpiece of the evening was a concert at the Hill Auditorium. It was a traveling troupe of Tibetan monks, putting on a show of overtone chants. I had mentioned them to Katerina, pointing out that they were playing in New York, Chicago, and LA. The only other town they were hitting? Ann Arbor. She got tickets somehow, though the Hill isn’t capacious by any stretch.

As we approached the filled auditorium, I felt the anger crawling up my spine. I reached out mentally to hold it back, but with the alcohol it was like trying to catch a pig with greased fingers.

At the edge of the crowd, going up the steps, I was only at a six. I ran through Dr. Rickova’s cognitive-behavioral steps. Yes, a six. No, I couldn’t identify the source—Katerina was a stellar date, everything my life was doing well. If there wasn’t a cause for my anger, then I could acknowledge that it was unnecessary.

I stopped so suddenly that I nearly dragged Katerina down the steps by the hand I was holding. She looked at me, puzzled, but saw something in my face.

“Are you ok?”

Am I? I ticked up to a seven in those few steps. What would happen if I kept going up those stairs, to where the people packed in like chattel in a slaughterhouse? I looked at Katerina and I knew in my heart that she would be no different to me than the others, that I would have dark dreams of gashing her open or toppling her from the balcony to break on the floor below. Even at a six or seven, I could sense those thoughts sloshing in my brain.

“I have a migraine,” I said.

Her face fell, though she tried to cover it with a compassionate look. “Ok,” she said. “Let’s get you home.”

She’s downstairs, watching a Cary Grant movie on TV. I think I’m going to have to leave her.

July 12th, 2016:

I thought a little bud would chill me out. You never hear about marijuana fiends tearing up a Seven-Eleven and being shot six times before going down. Stay tuned, I guess.

Ann Arbor has decriminalized, but I didn’t want to run into anyone I know, so I drove down to Chelsea. In a stoner’s haze, having all of those “my hand is so big” thoughts, I wandered to a church sale, where Mrs. Hyde erupted.

I think I cracked a blonde hippie’s head with a bread maker. I definitely remember grabbing a handful of jewelry made from welded keys and jabbing it into the face of a pregnant woman. There were shouts and screams, and someone tried to grab me, but I took a cast-iron cornbread pan from a folding table and brained them. I did the same to the next two who came near.

I wasn’t alone. There were more screams than I accounted for, and when the haze cleared enough for me to see, three other people were flailing at the sale-goers with assorted rummage items. I didn’t get a good look at them.

The local news is calling it a terrorist attack. They haven’t caught anyone yet, and the police can’t see a connection between the assailants.

Neither can I.

July 13th, 2016:

Tonight we were in the kitchen, and Katerina was cutting up bok choy. I was at the table, nominally peeling ginger, but in reality my mind was drifting to the knife in her hand, and what kind of damage it could do.

The rage wasn’t in me, but the bloody thoughts were. When had it gotten this bad? Had all those hours of holding back my vicious visions worn ruts in my brain, so that my thoughts flow in that direction regardless?

“I’ve met someone,” I said, without my voice even breaking. The knife thunked down onto the cutting board one last time.

I wonder if she thought about the knife in her hand, even for a moment. Whatever thoughts they were, they lasted a while. Ira Glass on the radio tried weakly to fill the silence until she finally spoke.

“Who?”

I hadn’t thought that far ahead. “A psychology lecturer. We met on the track.” There. Two entirely plausible statements.

She began cutting again. “We’ll work it out,” she said. “We’ll see Dr. Rickova, or someone else that specializes in couple’s counseling.”

“I’m leaving, Katerina.” Now my voice did crack, and Katerina turned around and seemed to peer through that crack and the lie it represented.

“No,” she said simply, not forcefully, but assuredly. “Asher needs you, and he needs me. I know you’re going through a lot right now, but you and I, we need each other, too.”

July 15th, 2016:

How many people would it take to kill everyone? I don’t mean an invasion, where the defenders get to regroup and dig in. How many would it take, in one moment, to turn on everyone else nearby and end them?

After a lot of thought, I figure I could take out five people before being subdued. But what if the sixth person was also in a red haze? Maybe it wouldn’t even take one-in-six to kill all mankind. Maybe it would only take one person in ten, if they all turned at once. Especially if one-in-ten included police officers and soldiers.

There was another story on the news today of two auto part factory workers coming in with guns and shooting the place up. Twelve dead. And that’s the third shooting like this in a week. Not to mention riots in Frankfurt, Delhi, a half-dozen other major cities worldwide. Maybe this is just the tip of the iceberg.

When P. aeruginosa infects a host, it stays dormant. It sneaks by the immune system, acting like a model citizen instead of a vicious bacterial sleeper cell, if you’ll pardon the pun. All the while it sends out a coded chemical message: I am here, I await. It listens for the same chemical message in the medium, and when it detects enough, a sure sign that its confederates have grown in strength and number, it attacks. The wave of suddenly-virulent P. aeruginosa sweeps through the host’s body and destroys it.

Instead of killing a few victims at a time, they mount a surprise offensive and take the defenders unaware. A parallel killer, instead of a serial killer. The process is called quorum sensing.

July 16th, 2016:

I still needed something stronger to chill me out. My weed hookup knew who I should call for a more varied pantry, a guy who goes by Quark in Ypsilanti. I don’t know if it’s a reference to the particle or the Ferengi. I called from a pre-paid cell phone I bought under a fake name, and he told me to meet him in downtown Ypsi. He said he’d have what I was looking for.

We met at a bar by the tracks, where he looked me up and down and pointed with his forehead that I should meet him out back. My nerves were already taut in the smoky, crowded dive, so I guess I was ready when I went out the back door and down the three steps to the alley.

He was standing a few feet away, and he waited for the door to close behind me before saying anything. “Take ...” he started to say as he reached behind his waist, but I couldn’t hear what. Time seemed to slow, and his voice became a modulated drone.

My muscles didn’t move any faster than normal—well, not any faster than my new normal, with my toned body, but with my mind working at speed they didn’t need to. By the time his elbow cocked forward to bring the gun around, I was lunging toward him, both hands out. His face was just registering surprise when the gun came around his waist, ready to whip forward. My left hand already gripped his elbow, and my right hand was ready to catch the gun.

My finger slipped right in front of his, crushing it against the trigger just as it pointed into his pelvis.

As he dropped onto steps, screaming, I slapped the gun away so it clattered down the alley. He clutched at his hip, probably trying to apply pressure to slow the bleeding, or maybe just out of the instinct of a wounded animal. I kicked his head back and then stomped it onto the concrete steps. He stopped moving. I don’t know if he died, but I have a guess.

Someone had surely heard the shot, but inside there were cries of alarm and screams of rage. Soon, there were more shots, too.

I pulled whatever I found from Quark’s pockets and ran down the street to my car.

Six hundred thirty dollars and a bottle of indeterminate pills.

July 20th, 2016:

I sat at the park, dosed with an unknown pill from Quark’s stock, labeled with a big “M” on one side and “6X ER3” on the other—I’ll look it up later. I still hear the screaming rage in my head, but it’s as though it was kind enough to go down to the basement and shut the door.

I’m at a nine, easily. As I look around the park, children play under the bright July sun, which today inspired temperatures in the mid-nineties. For each child, I imagine a brutal death. The golden child on the soccer field gets beaten with his own cleats. The twin girls playing with their puppy are strangled with the leash.

The adults aren’t immune. I think of beating the t-ball coach with a tiny aluminum bat, or tackling the jogging pensioner into the rocky creek.

I see weapons everywhere. There are only two basic requirements for an improvised assault device—it should be hard, and either sharp or heavy. Virtually everything qualifies. The rocks along the creek, an elderly woman’s walker, the cracked asphalt along the parking lot. The glass SoBe bottles in the hands of every other pedestrian are interesting—a two-use weapon. At first it is hefty and hard, and after it shatters across an eyebrow it’s dense and sharp. But after the second thrust or swipe I figure it’ll be useless. Of course, I have my own feet and hands as weapons of last resort. My arms and legs are getting huge. We are way past toned here, people.

Swimming unstained through these blood-drenched daydreams is a lithe young woman. Anger lights her eyes and darkens her face. I can see her balled fingers clenching. Among all the beating hearts at the park, hers is the first I’ve found that I don’t want to stop.

What makes her special? Is her rage a shield against mine?

July 26th, 2016:

I don’t trust myself anymore. Day and night are filled with thoughts of cleaved flesh and shattered bone. During these dreams and daydreams, I feel like I’m surfing on waves of wrath that can, at any moment, spill me over and crush me. Only by lashing out can I stay afloat.

I should be prepared. I went to a gun show today in Mason. They’re supposed to check ID, but I slipped another fifty and the chubby guy in orange camo made up a name to write down. I bought a box of ammo, but I hid most of it under the kitchen sink. I keep one round in the chamber, and the gun in my purse.

I told Katerina that I’m leaving her. I had to take Quark’s Big M to do it, to put enough of myself behind a wall to say that I no longer loved her. I told her I was leaving with my imaginary girlfriend and boyfriend— I figured upping the ante might help. She cried and said that we could still work it out, but that perhaps it would be better if we had some space.

That’s as close to rejection as Katerina is willing to give me.

August 1st, 2016:

I found a foreclosed farmhouse out toward Milan. I’ve never lived in rural areas, but I think it’s best now that I get to a low-population-density neighborhood. This seems to qualify—my nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away. I could have moved out farther, but I still need to get to work.

The owners had it on the market for a year, so while they were reluctant to rent it instead of sell it, they agreed. I moved in today.

I dread the return of classes. I have a month left with the summer skeleton crew, but when the undergrads return, how will I deal with it? The crowds will trigger me, I’m sure of it. I can’t take it day in and day out. I’ll kill somebody.

The thing is, I’m not scared that I’ll kill somebody. I feel no emotion about it at all. I have to intellectually process information that should be emotionally obvious. I feel like a sociopath.

August 3rd:

Patricia has been working with a microfluidics guy on the P. aeruginosa. Today she came in with the results. By messing with the volume that a single bacterium has to live in, they can get it to trigger quorum sensing when it’s all by itself, in a small enough space. This is a big deal. It means that the P. aeruginosa aren’t really sensing their population, they’re sensing their population density.

While wandering around on Big M, I’ve noticed something. Every time the anger spikes, I can always find at least one person who I don’t want to eviscerate. Sometimes there’s even more than one, which sometimes corresponds to greater fury.

So, when Patricia left, I closed myself in my coat closet. It didn’t work. If the fury I’m feeling is some resonant effect with others who feel the same thing, it is working on some other principle. I need more experimentation.

August 6th, 2016:

Today I kidnapped one. He’s about twenty, fit, actually pretty attractive, with a wavy-haired surfer look and blue-gray eyes.

This morning I visited Lambert’s lab—he’s emeritus, but the bio department left him with a little lab space. He keeps a stock in there that saw the Nixon administration. He’ll never miss five hundred milliliters of pentobarbital.

I saw the kid through my red haze at the park. He shoved an elderly man. The man’s wife started screaming, and some preppie kid with a shih tzu dug out his cell phone. Surfer-dude scarpered, and I followed him back to his apartment.

I explained that I knew what was happening to him, that it was happening to me, too. I told him about the rage in crowds, and his eyes lit up. I didn’t even have to inject him until we got into my car.

He’s in the basement now. I took out the steps yesterday and moved everything important or useful out of there. I don’t think he can get out, and of course I tossed his cell phone in a pond well before coming out toward the farm.

But I don’t feel worked up or angry, even when I move close to him. He seems worked up, but no more so than anyone in his situation. He says his name is Clay.

My arms are huge now, and my legs. I gain muscle mass so easily. I’m lifting whatever I can find—five gallon buckets filled first with water, then with sand, and then bales of hay or big rocks. Standing naked in front of the mirror, all the softness and flabbiness is vanishing. I look like a beast.

August 11th, 2016:

P. aeruginosa’s signal can be understood with a mathematical formula. The rate at which each cell produces it is proportional to the amount of signal it senses externally. That means that if the number of cells in a region doubles, the amount of chemical each one produces doubles, so there is a total of four times as much chemical signal in the surrounding fluid.

That doesn’t seem to be working here. I caught another one, this one a middle-aged housekeeper named Fatima. I threw her together with Clay in the basement, but we all failed to surge into a frenzy.

There’s something missing. Some other signal component? Already the density is much higher than I would experience at the park, and I don’t feel anything. Maybe I need some more, or maybe I need something else.

August 15th, 8:12 pm:

It turns out that there was another factor.

The first warning I had was tires on gravel. I peeked out the door and saw Katerina’s blue Mini Cooper bobbing along the rough drive. I was terrified that she would hear my subjects in the basement, now three of them, so I ran inside and turned on the radio. I dodged into the bathroom to choke down a pill, then ran back to meet her on the porch.

How had she found me? I didn’t forward my mail, and I didn’t change any addresses at school. Maybe she had just followed me from work one day. What had she seen?

“Hello, Maryam,” she said. Asher toddled alongside her, holding her hand. They were beautiful.

“What are you doing here, Katerina?”

“We came to take you back home.”

“Please come home, Mama.”

My heart seized and tears burned their way out into my eyes. The whole scene fogged in front of me. “I can’t,” I said. “I’m so sorry, baby. It isn’t safe to be with Mama right now.”

Why couldn’t the pill take over? I wished so hard to see all this through its pane of bulletproof glass.

Katerina pushed through the door while I stared at our son. “What the hell is going on in here?” she yelled.

I rushed in. The basement door tilted half on its hinges. Clay stood by it, giving a hand to Mary, a recent acquisition. Katerina looked shocked.

I didn’t have time to process it. A red curtain seemed to drop over my vision. Clay’s panicked look morphed into one of rage, and Mary began growling. All this registered distantly in my mind, but at its forefront, Katerina seemed encircled in a spotlight.

I yelled and tackled her to the ground, gouging her eyes with my thumbnails. She didn’t fight back, she only screamed in fear and betrayal.

I heard some scraping, and Clay rushed over with the wooden knife block from the kitchen counter. He ignored the knives and, as I was worming my thumbs into her brain, he swung the whole block like a hammer. With the first blow Katerina stopped fighting, with the second one she stopped breathing.

When the red curtain lifted, I sat astraddle my wife’s body while Clay, Mary, and now Fatima looked down in horror.

Clay looked at his stained hands, and at the puddle of blood that oozed around a pair of toddler’s size five shoes. Asher still looked down at his other mother, a snarl warping his face.

Clay’s face drained of all color. He stammered something and looked at his hands.

I crawled to my purse on the couch and snatched it up, then stumbled to the cabinet under the kitchen sink. I made sure to do my business where they couldn’t see.

“What just happened?” Fatima asked at last, voice shaking.

My pistol answered her, the last answer she’ll ever hear. Though they didn’t ask, Clay and Mary got the same answer.

Then there’s Asher, looking confused but not crying.

When the red curtain dropped, I didn’t want to kill him. That snarl of his is burned into my mind.

Why isn’t he crying? Why aren’t I?

August 15th, 8:31 pm:

I became a scientist because I couldn’t stop asking questions. Why? How? What?

As the flames of the farmhouse filled my rearview mirror, I wondered who. Who would have done this to us? Who could have? How could they insert a quorum-sensing gene into the human line? The other associated changes—the rage, the muscle bulk—beggar belief that a human agency could be behind it. That and the extent. New reports of riots and violence on the radio are worldwide. It’s crazy, but I’m convinced that somewhere along our way, something decided that we should wipe ourselves out just as we got populous enough to bump elbows around the whole globe.

The questions fill my mind rather than thoughts of Katerina. I wish I could say it was shock, but I know better. The thin film of grief is one I’ve manufactured, because the person I think I am should grieve at the sudden death of her love. But really, even accounting for the Big M’s, I don’t feel anything.

Asher babbles in the back seat. He hasn’t asked about Mommy.

August 15th, 9:00 pm:

I left Asher in the car. It was dark by then, and I couldn’t risk encountering a human with him in tow.

It hurts to make that distinction, but I have to get used to it.

Patricia was in the lab. She looked at me with a frown and pinched eyebrows as I started shoving equipment into my bag. Petri dishes, gel plates. I wish I had room for the centrifuge.

“Doctor Kalbasi,” Patricia said. She was never comfortable addressing me by my given name. “What are you doing?”

I didn’t say anything to her. The police will be after me soon, anyway. If they don’t have too much to handle.

She got up from the microscope bench and stood near me, watching me shove primers for PCR into my bag. It’s a long shot, but I hope to isolate any genes that are causing this.

“Are you ok?”

I hated her sympathy. I didn’t deserve it. But the dark thoughts didn’t stir.

There were footsteps in the hall. My heart pounded two beats for each step. Police? Grad student?

The door swung open and an older man in coveralls leaned in.

I turned away and gripped the bench as a red haze flooded my brain. I floated there, at a nine at least.

“Evenin’” he said, grabbing the trash can by the door and dumping it into his cart.

As the door swung shut, still gripping the bench, I looked over my shoulder. Patricia’s face was flushed. Her teeth were gritted. Rage shone through her tiny pupils.

I didn’t want to kill her. I wanted to chase down the janitor and tear out his throat with my teeth.

So instead I cracked Patricia’s skull open with a ring stand.

August 16th, 1:11 am:

I can’t get Patricia out of my head. A flash of white bone before the blood poured through. Twitching legs. Gasping breath. It’s the same with the three that I shot.

I can’t sleep. When I think of Katerina ... nothing. Even when I killed Quark, it was self-defense. Whoever they are, what they’ve done has stolen my wife and my grief. For that I hate them beyond measure.

I’m on the road now. On the radio, a local newsman just read that there have been dozens of murders in the past week—unheard of in our college town. After that, Robert Siegal introduced a report that Mumbai has gone dark after a day of rioting.

The police will be after me, but it sounds like they’ll be busy.

The thoughts of chasing down the janitor had vanished the moment I brained Patricia. That has to be a clue, but I don’t understand it. How could the quorum sensing signal dissipate instantly?

Asher snores softly in the back. I can’t bear the thought of what I should do to both of us, so I’ll do the next best thing I can. I’ll find the others like me, programmed with this insidious signal, and one by one, I’ll kill them. 

Jackie Neel is a biophysicist/mathematical biologist. He has researched how bacteria communicate chemically in a host. His stories have appeared in “The Colored Lens,” “SQ Mag,” “The Future Fire,” “Every Day Fiction,” and “Mad Scientist Journal.”