MAX ORDOS DOES NOT EXIST

MAX ORDOS DOES NOT EXIST: CHAPTER SEVEN

Pearl watches television until nightfall, then goes back to the diner and sits at the counter this time, ordering coffee and something called a Greek burger. The menu doesn't give details. He lights a cigarette and sips coffee and doesn't notice who sits down next to him until she clears her throat. It's the lady from the farmer's market, the one he saw leaving the Regenerative Medicine Institute.

"You again," she says.

"Me again," he says. "How's your job situation?"

"The same." She orders coffee and pie when the waitress comes around, then turns back to Pearl. "I don't think I introduced myself before. Jane Cornette." They shake hands. She's wearing the same roomy clothing as before, and her Institute ID is still clipped to her sweatshirt. According to that, she's a doctor.

"You work for the Institute," Pearl says, trying not to blow smoke directly in her face. "It can't be that bad, can it? Must pay okay."

"It does," Jane says.

"But you still wanna quit?"

"Yeah," Jane says as her pie and Pearl's Greek burger arrive. The burger has crumbled feta cheese and spinach on it, and smells faintly like the spices they use in lamb kabobs. It's not half bad.

They eat in silence for a moment, then Jane asks him about his union delegate job. It takes Pearl a second to remember he'd said that before, which he passes off with chewing, then tells her about some construction projects going on in Baltimore and how developers file fake charges against union workers until the union pulls out, at which point the developer can hire scabs. It's something he's observed enough as a private investigator to talk about broadly.

"So yeah, it's a huge mess," he says in between mouthfuls of burger and fries. "The city really needs to step in, but they won't." Jane listens with interest, but she has nothing to add, and asks for the check as soon as she finishes her pie.

"I gotta run," she says. "Thanks for chatting."

"Sure," Pearl says, and turns back to his burger as she pays and leaves. He notices that she left half a cup of coffee behind and wonders if it would be gross to finish it. He decides that it would be.

Instead, he uses the bathroom, pays for his food, and smokes a cigarette as he drives out to the Carlisle house again. There are no cars in the parking pad this time, but he still parks down the street anyway. The house is quiet aside from a few rats scurrying away from Pearl's flashlight, and now that he expects the smell, it's not as bad. He searches the house upstairs and downstairs, checking every closet and feeling along walls for doors that may have been covered up. He gives the cellar a thorough inspection too, but finds nothing except cobwebs and more rats.

When he checks the front windows to make sure no cars are coming, his sinuses pinch and the inside of his head tightens. He spins around and sees the woman in the letterman jacket standing next to the fireplace.

Isolating a mind turns it upon itself, and the longer it takes, the better, she says. People forget about us, we forget ourselves, and then it's the furnace, with no ethical boundaries crossed. Her lips move, but they don't match what she's saying. Her voice is already in his head, and it's not her voice. It sounds mechanical, not human.

Pearl shines the flashlight in her face and approaches her. She disappears. He yells and kicks the fireplace, and dislodges a brick. He hadn't expected that, and squats down, peering into the fireplace. Bricks have been laid inside it, but without much mortar. He grabs the edges of another brick and pulls it free with ease. His head is buzzing with pain. He pulls bricks away until he reveals a thick metal safe door behind them. His hands shake as he gets the key from his pocket and unlocks the door.

Papers, hundreds of them, are stuffed inside the safe. At first, they're all scribbles and illegible handwriting, but as Pearl goes through them, he finds multiple sketches of the girl in the letterman jacket. Other papers have Max Ordos does not exist scrawled on them over and over again, along with notes detailing things Pearl has heard — brains, meat, isolation, jars and computers — and some he hasn't. Give me a body, one paper says. I was promised a body and I want it. The last few papers are drawings and primitive schematics for the well, with repetitions of Max Ordos' name penned in the margins.

Pearl storms outside to the well, his sore head a mess of static. He can barely focus or keep his balance, but he still shines the flashlight down into it. His eyes swell and the beam from his flashlight digs into them like a blade. His brain churns inside his skull. He can't hear the car pull into the pad behind him or see the red and blue lights washing over the yard. He can't even see the flashlight fall from his hand as someone behind him pushes him down the well.

Pearl wakes up in pain, sitting upright on a mound of dirt and trash. His knee is swelling up and his back and right arm are killing him. Worse, the static in his head hasn't gone away, although it has subsided. It's like someone carbonated his cerebral fluid. He pictures his brain dissolving in a tray of soda and shudders.

As his senses return, he realizes that he is in a hole. He looks up to the top and can barely see the streetlight. No way he can climb back up. Not in this condition. He tries to stand up, but his knee and back won't cooperate. He sits there for a while, despondent. He's in the well. He decides that someone pushed him. Sheriff West, or another cop, most likely. He's going to die down here, he thinks, and that thought hunkers down in his mind as he feels around for his flashlight. He finds it, and finds the batteries soon afterward. He has to hold them in himself, but his flashlight works.

He shines the light around, and once he sits still again, he hears music coming up from below him. Faint music, but still. Is there a radio buried under all this garbage? Pearl decides to investigate, since he has nothing better to do.

The garbage and dirt smell awful, but they're soft enough to dig through, although Pearl's right arm is useless. It takes hours to dig a tunnel leading straight down through the pile. Pearl worries about suffocating as he pushes himself through it face-first, holding his arm close to his chest and dragging his useless leg behind him. The music gets clearer as he digs further down, and after another couple of hours, he sees light. He digs toward it, exhausted and hurt and unaware of what he's heading into, and the static in his head builds up again until his eyes shut to relieve some of the pressure.

When his arm plunges down into open air, he takes a deep breath and pushes through and falls again, managing to turn and land on his back in another, smaller pile of trash that has collected on a pale blue tile floor. He is staring up at a ceiling with a ragged hole in it. Dirt sifts through and falls on his face.

Pearl rolls onto the floor and braces himself against a shelf to stand up. The room he's in is lit with emergency bulbs set into sconces along the walls, which are mostly shelves. The music is pop he'd hear on any Top 100 station, and as he pulls himself along the shelf with his good arm, he hears a promo for the college radio station. The trash smell gives way to a sterile alcohol smell. Pearl falls and picks himself up and falls and gets up again before he bothers paying attention to what's on the shelves.

Jars. Rows and rows of jars, hundreds of them. Many of them have human brains floating in them.