“What’s wrong with?” I point at his leg.
“Too much sitting. Doctor said I should stop. But we have our defenses to shore up.”
“Are you the only one?”
He squints at me like I’m stupid.
“You doing all right?”
He looks over his shoulder. “How’s Turing?”
“He seems to be all right.”
“Really?” Another squint, and a tilt of his head while he holds his back.
I really don’t care for Yusef and yet I feel sorry for him.
“Because,” Yusef goes on. “He was really stressed. Maybe over stressed.”
“Turing? He’s a robot, how can he be overstressed?”
Yusef’s eyes dart from me to over his shoulder and back again. He shuffles off and I’m left there, my heart still beating irregularly, my thoughts not exactly as concise as I want them to be. I want to trust someone. But as Yusef’s back disappears around a corner, I wonder why that is, because I trust him not one bit. So who do I trust? Turing? Yes, Turing. That’s trusting something, but in that metallic body and mind there’s something predictable about him. It. I realize then that I have never needed a drink of scotch more than now.
I make my way downstairs, and the open air of the street is refreshing, if a little polluted and loud. Out here I notice more graffiti. On the wall beside the office there’s spray paint, “When the corpses pile too high, where shall we live.” I chuckle. It’s childish. But what it’s lacking in insight, it makes up for in beautiful block letters and color—this is spray paint, mind you. I walk on, and as I cross the street, an MTA bus parks in front of me, its billboard ad mutilated by these words, “God said to moses I have only begun to test you. And moses said I'm getting real sick of your shit, God.” This pulls more than a chuckle out of me. I wonder who the brave soul is, for the writing is in the same block letters as before.
A few minutes later, walking towards the D-train subway stop, I notice Turing’s gait, next to a well-dressed gentleman in all black and a cane. They’re facing away from me, so, feeling a spark of pain in my chest, I quicken my pace to follow them. I’m certain they haven’t seen me, but they quicken their pace as well. I lose them when they turn into a narrow alley. When I turn, I see no one. Following the alley to its end, I see no doors. After a few seconds I suppose it will look suspicious if I’m caught here and I leave the alley.
“Hello, friend.”
I spin, my skin tightening, my fists clenched, ready for a blow.
With boyishly ruffled blond hair, looking much younger, there stands Behemoth. My heart racing, I can’t think of anything to say.
“Cat’s got your tongue, eh?” He walks over to a black limo waiting on the side and opens the back door leaning away from it on his cane. “Come. Got some fifty year old scotch you just have to try...” He looks at me, his smile growing. But those eyes, cutting, full of venom. “You still like scotch, or are you making a grab for puritanical points?”
How did he know that I was in the mood for scotch? Nevermind that. “Who were you just talking to?” My voice’s low and gravelly. This only widens Behemoth’s smile even further.
“Oh, you know.” He looks down to his feet, squirming like a child caught in the act. But then he looks up, a glint of evil in that eye.
My heart in my mouth, tightening my field of vision around him, I try to shake the idea that Turing was just consorting with the enemy. Several steps later, I’m close to him, glancing about every now and then, expecting to be snatched, even here in a City street in broad daylight.
“You are at a loss for words, aren’t you?” He smiles, two rows of beautiful teeth glinting in an errant ray of light. Then, with a swift movement of his hand, he slices his cane over my head.
I flinch. Immediately the violence that I know is at his disposal becomes known to me. I stand my ground. “Was it?”
“You’re a real bore, you know? Much too fundamentalist for me.” He twirls his cane. “You have my word that I won’t touch you. Just come for some scotch.” Bowing, he indicates that I should get in the car with him.
What else can I lose? And some scotch would be great.
“You’re thinking too much.”
But it’s not easy to lose the sense that violence pervades his every pore, and that itself brings up from the dead—as if they were living in my marrow—memories and shivers from the cages, from sitting on my knees for hours.
“Is he coming or not?” A voice from inside the car asks.
I freeze. It’s the woman I saved from Behemoth. The one that’s now his partner in crime. I take a step back. “No thanks.”
“Oh? You’re not scared, are you?” He puts on an overly-concerned face. “Because you know my promise is as good as anyone’s.”
“Not that,” I say. “Just that I have things to do.”
“Oh. Things to do. Recruiting, isn’t that right?”
I flinch, try to remain calm. “Not at all.”
Behemoth smiles. “Oh?”
I scan the street.
Behemoth takes a step towards me. He smells like cigars and sardines. His breath smells like kerosene. “I know everything, sweetheart. Don’t I ever catch you in my city again.” His voice is sharp, deadly.
I should react, maybe even punch him, in fact I think on doing this, but I can’t. I’m just rooted to my place, my feet stuck, my arms by my sides, my fists impotently clenched.
“Oh, just because we aren’t hunting you right now, doesn’t mean we can’t do it whenever we want to. You think Turing is helping you?” He leans back, his eyes blue-white with dark black lines forming a lattice over them. There’s no way he’s human.
I’m expected to answer, but I can’t. I tell myself that I won’t dignify this with a response. So why don’t I leave?
“He’s not. He’s with us. He’s helping us take down infections like you. All over the world.” He leans back even further to arc his arm in front of him. “And you? You won’t be anything but vaporized dust in a few months. Just you try to walk like a free man.” He straightens up and raps the cane on the sidewalk. I’m still rooted to the place, thinking I should do all sorts of violence to him. To the woman I saved.
“But,” he continues. “In the meantime you could have some scotch. The best in the world. So why not?” Again his hand points towards the open car door. After a few seconds of waiting for me to respond, he chuckles and shakes his head. Smiling, he lets out a sigh. “Oh, right. You’re scared. Broken. Broken soldier.” He sings the last part, then he yells. “I have a broken soldier. Can anyone help me find his balls?”
For the first time in a few minutes, I’m aware of the busy street, of people walking all the way around us and the din of car horns and exhaust and that shrill pitch of car wheels treading over asphalt in concrete canyons. As is normal in the City, no one pays us any heed. A few people cast Behemoth a couple seconds of curious glances before scuttling along.
“Okay. I was too rough with you earlier, wasn’t I?” he says, smiling again while looking so apologetic. “I’m sorry. Can we start over again?”
“What happened to hunting me?”
“I was wrong.” He pantomimes a super sad face. “I’m really really sorry.” After another few seconds. “Christ, you really are no fun. Did we fuck you too hard? Is that it?”
Not sure why, but embarrassment actually creeps up on me. But also anger. I step towards him. “You really want t—“
“No, no.” He raises up his hands, cane dangling in the air. “I just meant that we won’t be hunting you.”
I’m wonder if Turing’s getting his marching orders from Behemoth. “I never did anything wrong. I was always and am always a patriot.”
Behemoth stifles a giggle. “Okay. But since you’re too broke to come. I’ll give it to you here.” He beckons me over. At the car door I see a glint of a red dress. A dainty, smooth wrist with a short-gloved hand holds out a tumbler of scotch on the rocks. Behemoth grabs i
t and points at me.
“Here you go. Have one. You’ve been working hard.”
I don’t trust any drink he’s about to hand over.
“It’s good,” he says and takes a sip.
My mouth watering, I take the tumbler and sniff it. Aged scotch. A sip, swirling it in my mouth and it’s easy to tell that it’s the good stuff. This one must have been aged in bog water. The slight salty taste is perfect. I finish it.
“See?” Behemoth raises one eyebrow.
“Mmm.”
Behemoth smiles wide. “Feeling better?”
“Much. Thanks.” I shouldn’t be looking to alcohol for relief.
Behemoth nods sharp nods and looks around the street. “This one is all right. All right.” Some of the pedestrians seem to agree with him. Behemoth snaps his fingers. “I got one for you.”
“What?”
“A fish walks into a wall.... Says dam.”
I chuckle. Or the scotch does, and I feel light, like all the problems and the weight tightening my head are all gone, but that doesn’t last long, because I hear the giggle of the woman in the car. The woman whose name I don’t remember, whose face I don’t remember, yet whose movements and voice I always will, and remember the cruelty in her voice when I was bound and on my knees. I remember what Behemoth wanted or created. I sober up.
“What about another one?” Behemoth asks.
“No thank you. But thanks.” I’m still embarrassed, still stuck between fear embarrassment and anger. There’s still a chance that I’ll punch him right here. And that might never end well for me. I turn and head back to the office where I lay in wait for Turing. When I see him, I corner him and shout accusations and epitaphs at him. I want to tear the flesh off his metal, so that I can see the real him, and I very nearly do, holding his cheek and trying to rip off the flesh, except that it feels too real and I can’t do that, I’m not crazed.
Turing talks me down. A little too well. He reminds me that we’re dealing with Behemoth for the meantime, and that it’s only to gain a foothold into that world.
“How come none of that money from all the contracts is helping us?”
“We need it for more research. That’s what they’re paying us for.”
I leave him be, though I’m not sure who to believe. My chest has become a smoldering fire and for the first time in my life I feel the grip of death, the sense that an impending heart attack is around the corner if I don’t do something. I decide to focus on my work. I remind myself of all the good that can be done by allowing Turing to help us humans. And after keeping a wary eye on him, and looking through all the folders of DOD and State projects we have, I decide that Turing’s doing well. And I remind myself that he’s a robot.
I help around with a few people in the office building and soon have them keeping tabs on things. Some are veterans as well, and are glad to keep an eye on things for me. Nothing comes out about Turing.
And in the background, when I pass TVs or see my personal feed, the news keeps talking about the need to attack. Always the need for more support, more time. Otherwise, somehow, people will make a leap across several oceans and kill us all. Somehow nothing about the mirror of that is mentioned. We can’t stop this anymore. Not with the app, or our plan to place pictures of what all the attacking is doing on people’s news feeds, or browsers, so now we’re doing the footwork. The grimy legwork of getting people out, yes even the homeless, and having them talk to other homeless people and having those people, sometimes down on their luck, sometimes just angry at all that’s going on. On the deterioration that may not occur in their homes, but occurs as soon as they step outside. These people are not satisfied with locking themselves behind some cocoon of idyllic proportions and want to see everything else.
I walk alongside one homeless man (though now they have that home underneath the city), he’s dressed in a suit now, bespoke, but even then there’s a disdain in the way he wears the suit, the way it seems just a tad bit too clean for him and his tastes, thus it hangs off him like there’s an electricity making him hate it all. We manage to get by a doorman by setting up a distraction with another one of our workers and make our way into the building. It’s not too fancy that its occupants can’t be moved by words alone, so we walk all the way in and knock on doors. Finally someone answers, and as is the case in the big city, he almost slams it on our face. But we’ve gathered quite a bit of information on each building and its residents. It will soon be out of date, since we no longer own the internet, but for now we can use it and more or less know the tenants. This man, and his wife, we know to be heavy readers. And I hand over a copy of Ulysses.
“Sorry to disturb, and I surely hope that you’re doing well. But... Read it?”
He looks at it for a second, then hangs his head and shakes it. “Been meaning to—“
“Too much work, right? Not enough time? And yet you can barely pay your bills.” We’ve also, as far as all our calculations are concerned, managed to know when someone is getting close to the breaking point of making payments. Hence the need to hit those further down on the social chain. This is not to ignore those towards the top end, because a few of them will be of exceptional moral character and will hate their fellow upperclass man and will want to help us tear down the edifice... but I’m getting ahead of myself. With this man, I hand him the book, tell him he should read it—not that it has any great point to it other than being a piece of western literature—and then tell him the reason to come to our meetings.
Meetings. These were started by some of our helpers at the homeless shelters who wanted to show or tell us how to get more and more people to come, as well as to create some level of community. And we do. We get them and we give them small speeches on how those in power are wasting money on more and more fantastical ideas of grandeur overseas instead of here at home, and thus the reason why they have potholes and other such things in their backyard. This man, well spoken, agrees to come.
For weeks and weeks I do this. A door to door salesman. Driven like a madman, and I hardly rest. Our meetings grow in size, and so do the protests. We can, until the riot police turn up, clog up any street and intersection whenever we want. So far no one in power has listened, or changed what they’ve done, but they will, I am certain of that. And I’m thrilled with the idea that things could be changing for the better. And when it appears that I have nothing more to teach the recruiters, I decide to take a break.
So I text Dalcia, asking if I can come over. After some hesitation, and my turning nervous, she texts back, sounding sort of sweet but angry in that very specific City way (which means one can’t act angry because that means that one cares) asking me why I ignored her all this time and that we had plans earlier. Did we? I’m not sure, but I apologize profusely.
I head over to the art gallery and see Kurt at the front door. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that I’m going to meet with Dalcia, but I’m ecstatic and filled with energy. “What’s up, man?” I say and put out a hand. Kurt slaps it, smiling as if this is unexpected.
“Fine. You?”
“They have you on door duty, eh?” I grin. “Should be at attention.”
“Yeah, ha. That would be a shit detail.”
My eyes flicker to the inside of the studio.
“You here for Dalcia?” His grin widens even more.
I almost blush. “No, no. I’m here to see what’s new at the gallery... of course I’m here to see her.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Nothing’s going on, Kurt,” I say.
“Right.”
“Hey, she’s like a little sister to me. There’s nothing there.”
Kurt raises his two hands to his chest, like he’s innocent. “If that’s your thing, fine. Keep it in the family.”
I laugh. It’s been a while since I laughed. “All right man. You been doing good?”
“Fine. Helping out here helps ease my mind, you know?”
“I know. Some good works here.”
&
nbsp; Kurt rolls his eyes. “Better to see them in action. Not sure if I understand the end pieces.”
I nod, the conversation dying. After a short goodbye, I walk in.
“George?”
I turn back to Kurt. “Yeah?”
He looks at me, for the first time since he was brought back to life... or whatever he is, he seems worried. “You still writing?”
“Oh that? No.”
“Why?”
That’s a dagger in my heart, but I let it go. It feels good, almost to the point of bringing tears to my eyes, to hear someone say that about my work. “Not sure.” Luckily my voice doesn’t crack. Do I really want to go into how I read something written by a computer that was perfect, beyond perfect in fact, and that I was no longer viable?
Kurt nods, but doesn’t seem satisfied with the answer and the air fills up with tension.
“George?”
I turn and see Dalcia. I turn back to say something to Kurt, but he’s looking out to the street, hopefully forgetting our conversation. I turn back and walk to Dalcia. I try to keep my eyes nonchalantly on the pictures on the sides of the walls. But they’re composed of shocking stuff, so when I turn my eyes back onto Dalcia, I almost trip.
“Hey,” I say and hug her. She’s wearing a suit that does a good job of hiding her figure, but not good enough to hide it from my errant imagination. “How are things going at the art gallery?”
“Fine.” She looks around as if to double check her statement, then looks at me, smiling, and slaps my arm. “You missed my birthday.”
“How old?”
“Twenty.”
“Oh, I’ve been busy,” I say. Suddenly realizing that I didn’t even have a gift, or anything that could possibly be a gift for her, and also that I’m not even sure how long I’ve been working, been recruiting. What’s the weather like? Just warm? Does that mean it’s summer or spring or fall or a warm winter day?
“You still thinking a lot, huh?” She laughs.
She smells like flowers, but I don’t say that and just grin. “Can I see the gallery?”
The Labyrinth of Souls Page 34