“It’s a matter of the entire picture.”
Another roll of her eyes. “Okay. But that’s...”
“What?”
“Nothing.” She picks up the Bible again, starts to read it. After a few minutes, she frowns.
“Something wrong?” I say, reminding myself not to lecture her.
“This Bible is wrong.”
“They all are,” I say, grinning.
She looks at me. “No judgement, huh?” Anger rising in her voice. What are we? A couple?
“Sorry, it was a joke.”
“Read this.”
“Converting me?” I say and take the book.
“You’re beyond saving.”
A barb that settles again in my heart, even though she alleviates it some with a smile. I read the passage. Spare the rod, spoil the child. What children the lot are. I read it again. It seems to be somewhat off. “A misprint?”
“I guess. Thought it would be perfect by now.”
I bite my tongue.
She shakes her head, tsks. “You’re something else.” Then chuckles.
“I try. But...” I want to say something about the death and destruction going on around the world. No, the moment is good, that feeling in my throat is gone. I reach for the remote and switch off the TV.
We go to sleep. Against several fibers in my body kicking up a storm. After what seems to be only a few hours, I awake. Dalcia is up, now, writing.
“Now you’re the writer,” I say.
She smiles. “You should keep it up.”
“They—“
“I know what your boyfriend says. I’m saying that, maybe, writing is more than some feeling, or some feelings. Maybe it’s about us.”
Though I know she means the universal us, I can’t help but flatter myself by thinking she means the two of us in the room.
She continues: “Like, you know us writing down our own experience and knowing that another human is talking to us.”
It makes sense, maybe even is a reason for me to keep writing something more than just journal entries. But last night’s images on TV, Behemoth, and Dalcia’s words, and the name-calling of being a broken soldier rise all above the ability to be rational. “What do you have against Turing? I don’t get it. He’s helping you.”
Dalcia sighs. “Okay. I’ll stop.”
“It’s not a matter of stopping. It’s a matter of understanding.” Nothing. She’s looking at me with enough venom to make me want to crawl back under the sheets.
After a few seconds, she scribbles something. Then says, “Besides, I get what you’re doing. I’m just saying if he is a robot, no matter how nice he’s being to you, he’s been made by, someone else, you know? That means someone else controls him.”
Behemoth’s words come back to me. I let the chilling effect running through my blood die off. “We should get started.”
I want to make it all the way in a day. But the weather doesn’t comply. After a few minutes of driving under blue skies, a small equal starts. It thickens. We slow to a crawl.
Dalcia shivers. “How can anyone live out here?”
The storm has cleared some, but there’s enough snow on the road to have slowed things down. A few cars have spun out and lay, usually with flashing lights nearby, on the side of the highway. I see what Dalcia is talking about. The houses, the trucks, everything is worn down. There is that sense of decay everywhere here; whereas in the city it’s in select places. I even remember how I once romanticized the west. Perhaps I need more mountains.
“I know.” And suddenly a feeling hits me as I look at another farm house with littered gear all over its garden, or what it considered the grass around it, snow swirling all over.
“You okay?”
She really can read me, can’t she? “I’m fine.” My voice’s low, betrays me. “I just got the sense that this is the true America...” I press on the brakes, the sense of foreboding increasing, tightening my fists. “I’m going to be buried here.”
“Oh?” She reaches across and places her hand gently on mine. The sick feeling somewhat dissipates.
“It’s just a feeling. Something silly.” I want to punch something to help take all the feeling away. Dalcia rubs my hand. That does the trick. I force a smile. Why now? Why the sense of burial? Of being put beneath the ground?
“I know.”
“You do?” Not something anyone wants to hear from those who are younger. Especially the ones that seem to be carrying a torch of sorts.
“I felt better after I joined the art gallery. When I was helping to run it. But now... Nevermind. I forgot how defensive you are about Turing.”
“Christ,” I say, angry, though I’m not sure about what.
“He’s not human.”
“What’s so great about humans? You see the mess we’ve made?”
She looks at me like I’m another person, then looks out the window. “You really feel that way about your own people?” It’s said in a soft voice.
“No. No. I don’t.” I feel like a traitor now. I feel like the world is closing in on me. On my chest, specifically. “He’s... I just—”
“Look, I know he’s helped us. But maybe all that he’s doing isn’t going to help us.”
“But you think he’s controlled by someone.”
“Isn’t that the way it works?”
“Not always.” I stop because I don’t know enough about algorithms to make a statement either way. “He’s autonomous. He’s only reacting.”
“But with something someone told him.”
The snow outside picks up. Dalcia smells like sweat. It smells good. Then my aroma takes over. I should have showered. I grip the steering wheel harder. I’m thinking on Behemoth and what he said. Then I think on Turing, and burst of sorrow, for the machine, runs through me.
“Turing is with us. He learns from us. If you have something to say, to help him, let me know.”
“He’s studying us. Toying with us. Tell him to stop.”
“All right. I will.”
“I can tell you won’t. You think it’s a glitch or it’s harmless. It’s not.”
I don’t repeat that he’s helping us. That’s normal to look at what automated things do and assign them human motives, because that’s what I do too. So I let these thoughts and suppressions boil for a second, warm me up even, and I think about how silly she’s being, that she’s not looking at this through the right rational lens. But I remind myself that I have to be clear with Turing and see what he knows about Behemoth.
Silence falls on the car. Dalcia tries her luck with the radio stations. There’s nothing but country or Christian stations. I don’t remember middle America being so unsure. Something is surely bubbling underneath, but what is there to do about it. It’s the wind now, that has me gripping the wheel. It blows snow over from the wild fields and onto the road: wispy smoke trails of snow, some of it left in the wake of semi trucks that zoom past me.
“Can’t you go faster?”
I lurch the car forward. The car shakes, dances with the wind too much for my tastes. I slow down, she sighs. “It’s not safe.” I’m tense.
We don’t make it that night, though we’re close. Dalcia pays for another night, and I settle to sleep, not bothering to see if she reads the Bible or not. My back is tight. My age is showing: ten years ago this trip would have been nothing. As I drift into a slumber, I think twice about asking her for a massage. I think better of it.
The next morning I awake to see her writing on a pad next to me.
“You’re going to become an official writer if you aren’t careful,” I say, sitting up and rubbing my eyes.
She looks me over and her stern face finally breaks into a smile, staring hard into my eyes, boiling my blood. Oh, Dalcia, if only.
“We should get going,” I say, cracking through the tension, shattering it, in fact.
The car ride is filled with her shuffling through stations. She gives up after an hour: “They really don’
t want to know that other kinds of people exist, do they?”
I laugh. My reservations about her melt. She’s smarter than me. I try to remind myself to talk about the need to talk tot Turing about his activities, though I’m still pretty certain that his being hurt and acting human, humane in some ways even, is a step forward, shows that he cares about what we think, and thus now cares about art.
When we arrive at Ben’s house, on the outskirts of a mostly fabricated or mostly unimaginative town, he’s standing outside in a t-shirt, two dogs bracketing him, and the snow swirling all over.
He smiles and raises a shotgun in salute. We embrace. Dalcia slyly or shyly puts out her hand.
His house, a small two bedroom with a basement, is empty of most facets of middle class life. In fact, the whole house seems undone, with wiring and pipes running side by side with exposed edges of plywood or particle boards. One desk with a computer, one sofa and a bed in each bedroom. That’s it. Still, I know Ben to be someone who knows how to build houses, so maybe he’s simply in the process of getting finishing this. He eats standing at the counter which suits me just fine. The whole place smells of too many organic materials without the attempt to mask it in any perfume.
We eat a venison stew with rice that’s a large welcome to the gas station food we’ve been eating.
“So? How’s the movement, Che?”
I chuckle, taking it as a joke. “Going to shit.” Ben’s face tells me that he was dead serious. I slurp up some more stew. There’s some spice in it that I can’t quite put my finger on. “This is good, what’s in it that’s so good?”
“Weed.”
He’s serious. Dalcia half spits out what she has in her mouth. “You serious? You couldn’t have told us that?”
Ben leans back and falls into a convulsion, laughing. “You city folks. Always so proper. It’s good for you in certain forms. Like that hemp juice weed that those long-hairs sell.”
Dalcia looks at me confused.
“Long-hairs meaning hippies, children of the rainbow,” I say to her. I turn to Ben, pushing aside the bowl I have, not entirely finished. “You still have hippies out here?”
“Always. Breed like cockroaches.”
I shrug. “They’re good people for the most part.”
Ben huffs, makes a grunting noise like a forced laugh. “Sometimes. Some of them. But not when they’re pushing into your market.”
Dalcia looks at me, but I don’t want to expound, even if she seems lost, or even like she could use more helping from me.
“You should have told us,” she said and pointed at the stew.
Ben smiles at her. There’s something between them, and though I swore that I’d seen something sexual in it, now, here, they seem to be antagonistic.
I stare at my stew, hoping that I don’t become high anytime soon.
“How are things here?” I ask, to breach the silence between us, and to cut into the baying of a dog—which one I’m not sure—on the outside.
“Peachy,” Ben says, then slurps up his stew. “Just Peachy. You guys in the city are really starting up some trouble, aren’t you?”
“It’s not us,” I say.
Ben raises his eyebrows. “Seems like it is.”
“It isn’t. Well, we’re only reacting right now. We need to do more than that.”
“Reacting is never good, he says, staring into his plate then stabbing at some errant venison.
“No, it isn’t.” With Dalcia present I don’t want to talk too much about what it is that needs to happen between us and Ben.
We eat some brownies for dessert, and wash it down with beer. Local beer from a microbrewery nearby. I’m not exhausted, which is surprising given the car trip. Dalcia heads to the bedroom, our bedroom I suppose, and goes to sleep. Something’s bothering her, and I’m not sure what it is. Instead of asking, I watch out of the corner of my eye as she walks into the bedroom and see her lips moving, as if she’s muttering to herself.
Meanwhile, Ben takes out two AKs from the closet and hands one to me.
“It’s getting dark, isn’t it?”
“Come on, not yet.”
There’s a trail behind the house which leads to a ridge between two satellite peaks. We take that and stop before the ridge line, facing the wall of a mountain on one side. I turn the AK to semi and take shots at some rocks. The feeling brings back something like a rush of warmth to my heart, to my mind. I relax and take shots here and there.
“Bringing back memories?” Ben asks.
I laugh and fire a round off.
He starts shooting too. When we’re done he hands over another magazine.
“I’m good for now.”
He nods, and rests the AK on his shoulder, his hand gripping the barrel.
“What’s the matter?”
“We’re out of money.”
“All that trouble actually costs money? I though it was just chaos you wanted.”
Not sure if he’s trying to be serious or mocking. “It takes money. Especially with what they’re countering.”
Ben lets out a hug for air. “You had to know that if you try to take someone’s lunch, especially these people’s, that they would come after you with everything they had. You had to know that.”
“I know what this will cost me.”
“Fuck.”
I aim my AK at a rock. The sun is gently sloping down to some distant peaks, the sky turning orange and gray in some parts. I shoot a few rounds, pulverizing a rock. Ben’s right. I let the AK hang to my side. “I thought you were willing to help?”
“I am. I’m just making sure.”
“Feels like things out here are falling apart.”
Ben looks around. “They are. Everyone’s for themselves... I guess that’s the way it’s always been. But now—”
“It’s at third world levels.”
“Yeah. I guess you would know.”
“In the third world people know that the ones who are rich have only become like that by stealing. That’s a saying, in fact. That the corrupt say to one another that: an elephant has been felled and that there is enough for everyone to eat.”
“That’s exactly what it feels like here. That you need to hack as much out of the dead carcass as you can. Or else you’re going to miss out.”
I chuckle. “I’m guessing you got guns.”
“No way I’m going to be outgunned when all of this falls apart.”
I nod. “You’ll help us?”
“What do you need, guns?”
“Not yet, but we might. Need to start rat lines into the city. First we need money.” I see the look on his face. “Not from you. But we can help. Get some drugs into the city. We’ll help you sell. Help you get to the sources.”
Ben whistles. “Moving into a territory like the city. That’s nuts, George. We’ll be fucking fighting wars we don’t need.”
“We’ll handle that end. Just send us the product.”
“You have good places to stay on the way out there?”
“I’ll buy some places on the way back. Lots of abandoned houses that look ripe.”
“Don’t make them all broken down houses. Police know to look into places like that.”
“We’ll have fronts.”
“That takes time.”
“Time we have.”
“You sure about that? The fight overseas is escalating.” He seems to judge my face. “That’s fine, though. As long as you know what you’re getting into.”
“I’m already in it. I’m dead, as far as the world’s concerned. As far as I am. Might as well leave the world a little better off than before.”
Ben pats my shoulder. “Fuck, George.”
I force a grin. “Was a good ride while it lasted.”
Ben doesn’t answer. The sun’s fallen past the horizon without a fuss. The clouds, dark gray on a gray sky, darken. We trudge back, my back finally feeling weary. I fall asleep next to Dalcia, calmed by that smell of hers. In the middle of the nigh
t she gets up and leaves the room. For some unknown reason, that spikes my whole body with energy and I lay in bed for what seems like at least an hour, listening to the house, wondering where it is she went to, and when the beat of my heart and terse breath seem too much, she walks back in, sleeping next to me. I almost want to tell her she should go with Ben, that she’d ben better for it. But I don’t.
The next day I rest, finalizing a few details with Ben. His group is mainly moving weed. But there are hard drugs as well. Especially since weed has been legalized in a few states. That, though, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to grease a few palms, of the feds mainly, in those states. Overall, he says, with more and more people falling into some level of addiction, life is good. Why the house? Less obvious. He has plans to move to Ecuador soon. He donates some money to the ‘movement’ when he hears that there’s some chance that we might corner the AI market. I’m not sure he understands. Dalcia talks a few trips to the mountains around and doesn’t say anything when I ask her to go with me for a hike. We end up not going. What she did last night for so long is still on my mind, and I actually think that something like jealousy has crept into my mind.
I sense that I’ve gone too far. The entire deal makes me feel dirty, even if we’re in dire need of the money. But there’s no time for that now.
We leave the next morning. It takes several extra days to get back, even though the weather is perfect. I stop in multiple depressed towns or villages and find properties, with or without houses, far enough from the highway not to warrant any questions. Dalcia is kind enough to put her name on some, as having one name would be too much. Since I’m paying cash, most people simply hand over the deeds without so much as a murmur. These people, with their dilapidated houses, wrinkled faces, and stern eyes, give me a once over. I try to mention that I’m former military and that can sometimes help. None of them are chatty. Only a few take to Dalcia.
Riding back into the city, I feel like I’ve entered a prison. There are more troops than ever all over. I see another bus with the tag, “The fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another’s net.” It brings no smile to my face. I drop off the car and leave Dalcia at her apartment. When I see Turing, I pull him aside. We go down the elevator. The hallway that I once remember as long and dark has many new doors. Each one shines enough light that the hallway is no longer dark. We walk past all of them, even though my curiosity makes me want to see what’s on the other side, and we come to the door to the lake that I now recognize.
The Labyrinth of Souls Page 37