She never brought men home. Not that Ava and Taylor would mind. Just that it was their apartment, and they were giving her a deal, and she wanted to keep her private life just that—private.
“You can always bring him over.” Both of Les’s parents had exited, and now he and Christopher co-owned their condo. “You know, if you need a place.”
“The Love Hotel,” Jennifer had said.
“You’re saying he was good?”
“Transcendent.”
“Transcendent? Seriously?”
“If you only saw his hands.”
3
Wednesday, July 4—21:15:03
It was barely dark, and damn if Washington, DC, wasn’t exploding around us. Zach’s parents lived in Columbia Heights, 1.92 miles from the White House. A lower-middle-class neighborhood twenty or thirty years back, before the lower middle class got lowered out of existence. I was switched on because Jen was signed in for duty. Their joint is the second and third floors of a tiny condo. Nice place, but skinny. So skinny that Jen once said she needed to suck in her breath before slipping through the front door, but she never actually did, so I knew she was exaggerating.
Crazy place, though. Zach’s dad, Raffi, collected weird stuff. I mean stuffed stuff: stuffed real animals, stuffed fake animals, different brands of dried turkey stuffing, an old couch with stuffed cushions so plush you wouldn’t want to set a baby down or you might lose it. Raffi once claimed that he might switch to snuff boxes because he was sick of the stuff items, and this new hobby would require only a one-letter change; now it was pretty much too late for even that.
Raffi and Leah had built an illegal deck on their flat roof. It was my first time up there as more than a switched-off lump of programmed biological matter wedged into Jen’s brain. There must have been twenty of us up there. Plus the rooftop veggie garden Zach had put in. I did a quick calculation to see if the roof would support the planters, all that wet soil, plus all of us. When you only live to five, you don’t want to mess around with premature death.
Anyway, it wouldn’t be building collapse that got us tonight. Turns out that Columbia Heights is the pyromaniac capital of America. This place was going so nuts that no one on the roof seemed to notice the whump-whump-booms coming from the fireworks display two miles away on the Mall. Here, fireworks exploded overhead, sizzlers whistled in the alleyways, huge spectacles of light phumped in the sky in all directions. I felt the sound vibrate through her whole body. Clouds of gunpowder drifted under the streetlights down below. Extraordinary.
“Raffi,” Jennifer said to Zach’s dad, “did you know we invented fireworks?”
“Clever people, you Chinese.” Raffi smiled. “Tang Dynasty, I believe it was.”
Jennifer says that Zach inherited his curiosity from his father.
“But,” Leah chimed in, “there is some speculation it was earlier, in the Sui Dynasty.”
And his brains from his mother.
Jen said, “I didn’t know any of that.”
Leah waved her away. “Oh, it’s just one of those silly things you pick up.”
Jen wandered over to Zach. “What’s the matter?” she said.
“No rain for three weeks. I’m worried about fires.”
* * *
The call came in at 21:38:59: Domestic on V Street NW.
By the time we made it downstairs, I had one of the spanking new, deep purple cop motorcycles waiting for us. As we drove, I got the feed: African American. No arrests, no felony convictions, no warrants. Father had driven a taxi when he was young and had odd jobs as a night watchman and day laborer since then. Mother was a nurse, now unemployed, looks after a neighbor’s young child some nights. Taxes up to date. Grown son lives with them, works when he can.
Siren on, we raced, Jen’s adrenaline pumping into me like a fire engine running red lights through her veins. Good times.
We’re members of the Elder Abuse Unit. Some old-school stuff—vulnerable parents getting abused by no-good kids—but, these days, a lot of parents abusing kids by not wanting to exit. Jen says it’s sad news that we’re needed, but I say, with humans being what they are, I’m not surprised.
A large, three-story house converted into apartments. Rose bushes with delicate yellow flowers out front, gunpowder heavy in the air. A crowd had gathered outside the open front door. How they had heard the screaming over the war-zone explosions was anyone’s guess. One of the neighbors pointed over his shoulder with his thumb and yelled, “Second floor.”
We walked in, Jen’s hand on her holstered firearm. The stairs were clean; the hall smelled newly washed and polished. The only door on the second floor was ajar. We called out. It was quiet inside. That always makes you worried in domestics. Dead quiet equals dead people.
Jennifer called out again. Nothing.
Jen drew her gun, her forefinger lined up along the frame, ready to drop onto the trigger. We went inside.
They were in the kitchen, thankfully alive, but posed like a Norman Rockwell painting gone bad. Delmar Johnson Sr. and Delmar Johnson Jr., frozen at opposite ends of a once blue Formica table carefully set with cherry-red placemats, steel utensils, and china plates with tiny lavender flowers around their perimeter. The food was untouched. Facing us was Odette Johnson, Delmar Senior’s wife, and on a high chair next to her, a toddler was contentedly eating dry Cheerios, one by one. Senior and Junior were pointing handguns at each other.
Jen said, “Police. Put down your weapons.”
Neither man budged, and only Odette Johnson and the toddler looked up at us.
Junior said, “Mom, don’t you go movin’.”
I was formulating a strategy when Jen said, “Don’t do anything stupid.” I told her she’d just jumped ahead four steps. She grunted. We plastered on a calm voice and said, “Tell me what’s going on, will you?”
Junior said, “Nothing’s going on. That’s the problem, isn’t it?”
Senior said, “We never shoulda had you.”
Ms. Johnson said to Junior, “Baby, he don’t mean that.”
Senior said, “Like hell.”
Junior didn’t take his eyes off his father, but it was clear he was talking to us. “You see? You see what I put up with?”
“Mr. Johnson.” Jen meant Senior. “Sir, I need to ask you to put down your weapon.”
“And him finally get his way?”
Jen said, “This isn’t about that.”
“You stupid?” Junior said. “Of course that what it’s about. They don’t sign up. They ain’t gonna exit. What the hell’s in it for me? You tell me that. You tell me.”
We couldn’t, and we didn’t.
“Mr. Johnson, sir.” We were addressing the father again. “You shouldn’t have let it come to this. Don’t you think it’s natural for your boy to want a life?”
“He can do whatever the hell he wants.”
“That right?” Junior said, and shot him.
Senior fell back, firing his own gun as he toppled, the bullet hitting his wife in the chest. Jennifer shot Junior through the hand holding the gun. She’s a hell of a good shot under pressure.
Mr. Johnson Sr. was dead. Ms. Johnson mumbled one thing before she died: “We were gettin’ to Eden.”
4
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“65 and out” is the slogan created by the so-called Ice Floe Movement. At the time, a whole generation was threatened by (i) skyrocketing unemployment caused by artificial intelligence, although high unemployment was partially lowered by the epidemic of rapid onset spongiform encephalitis (ROSE); (ii) massive social unrest because of ever-worsening inequality and the availability of the longevity treatment to the very few who could afford it; (iii) the growing economic impact of climate change; and (iv) increasingly unaffordable housing prices. Faced with this generational threat, economists at the University of Chicago suggested in 2028 that the source of the problem was an oversupply of the elderly.
In order to reestablish
economic and population equilibrium, they successfully pressed for a voluntary policy of permanent retirement, or “exit.” If a single parent or a couple, by the age of sixty-five, volunteers for euthanasia, any of their children under fifty years of age has access to a modified version of the longevity treatment (known colloquially as “the treatment”). Unlike the longevity treatment available to the super-rich, who become Timeless, the modified treatment doesn’t stop recipients from aging, but it does protect them from ROSE and allows them to live in a fairly healthy state until well into their nineties, as long as they keep up with booster shots. In order to make the program sustainable, only those children with no children themselves are eligible. This modified version also sterilizes them.
5
Thursday, July 5—09:22:28
“But, sir, she said they were going to Eden.”
Captain Brooks stared at us. His smooth dark skin was marred by a thick keloid scar where his left eyebrow should have been. His old-school beard made him look like a baseball player from the teens or maybe one of the old hipsters, but without the good coffee or a baby on his shoulders.
09:22:41.
Jennifer swiped the back of her wrist across our forehead. “It’s going to be a hot one again, sir.” She smiled.
Captain Brooks did not smile back. He was third in the hierarchy of the MPD’s First District. Particularly since the district boundaries changed a decade ago, it is the most prestigious of them all.
A few months ago, Jennifer had told Les that she had heard a rumor that Captain Brooks had once laughed at a joke.
Les had said, “Not in my time.”
“Smiled?”
“Let me think.” Before he could take another breath, he added, “Nope. Not that either.”
“Act nice?”
Les said, “Forget it, Jen. He’s a badass hard ass.”
“I swear, he’s putting it on.”
“Yeah and I’m …”
“What?”
“Fuck if I know.” Les had looked around as if he was going to discover his missing metaphor, but shook his head and returned his gaze to her. “Listen, Jen. Just quit sucking up to him.”
“I’m not—”
“Jen, you’re my friend.”
“I hate when people start a sentence that way.”
“Your problem is you never stand up for yourself.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“I mean it. Don’t forget, you’re Cobalt Blue.”
He sometimes called her Cobalt. He said Jen was too pedestrian. As with any good nickname, it played on her name and physical features. Jen B. Lu, Chinese woman with extraordinary blue eyes, became Jen Blue. And at some point, Les decided she needed some playful ramping up and rechristened her Cobalt Blue. Superhero stuff. She said, “My eyes aren’t actually cobalt blue. And even if they were, that nickname is absurd.” But damn if she didn’t smile inside.
“Stop letting everyone push you around,” Les had said.
“Screw him. That better?”
“Much,” Les had replied.
Nevertheless, she did keep trying, or at least it seemed that way to me. Nothing too gushy. No boxes of chocolates. I couldn’t figure it out, though: both her oxytocin and cortisol levels spiked when she was around the Captain. Love and fear, comfort and anxiety, all mixed together in a voodoo stew. He’s a gruff sort of man, but every last one of the officers, Les included, trusts him and respects him, even if most of them don’t like him.
Jen is one of the few who likes him and wants him to like her. It’s one more human mystery that wasn’t programmed into my lines of code.
Anyway, I reminded her once again what Les had said. A fresh surge of cortisol gushed from her adrenal gland. But damn if it wasn’t aimed at me. Fuck off, she said to me, but I felt her vocal cords loosen to a lower register right before she spoke again.
“Sir,” she continued, this time more businesslike. Dropped the pleading tone and small talk about the weather. “This is the first outright confirmation I’ve had.”
“What kind of confirmation you got? She going to give you an address for Eden? Directions?”
“I told you, she died.”
He shot her a hard stare.
“Sir.” Defiance waning.
“Then I suppose, Jen, you still don’t have a thing. And you know—”
“I have a lead.”
“—why you don’t?” He stared her down in the way he must have done back when he was busting kids for shoplifting. “Because Eden’s all made up. A nutbar fantasy.”
“I don’t think so.” Weakly said.
“I don’t pay you to think.”
Jennifer thought, He’s watched too many tough-cop movies.
“Of course you pay me to think … sir.”
“What do you want?”
“To look into this Eden business.”
“No. And let me tell you again what I want.” He rubbed the knuckle of his thumb over the thick scar. “I want you to do your job and stop bothering me with this Eden crap.”
Even right then, I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell the captain was going to get what he wanted.
* * *
Lunch break. Keep her mitochondria chugging. We met up with Zach. Jen told me to shut up.
I listen. I learn.
I wondered if he even knew about me.
No, I heard back.
You know, I’ll be living with him, too, in a few months.
Clam up.
She and I are part of a trial run. They’ve selected eighty cops in DC for a three-year trial. As secret as they can make it inside the police department, which is kind of like saying as clothed as they can keep a strip joint. Absolutely no publicity outside, though; some rumors, but that’s about it. No one is allowed to tell spouses or friends. Hence, Zach doesn’t have a clue I’m eavesdropping on every sweet thing he says when I’m turned on and we’re together.
Only the beginning of the month and Jen’s lunch budget was already toast—burnt to a crisp because of the docked pay. She unwrapped a sandwich of pink tub-meat that tasted of seagull and a flap of lettuce with the consistency of wet toilet paper. We ate, then headed down an alley at 12:22:01.
Zach reached for her hand. “You allowed to hold hands on duty?”
“Lunch time.” Jen laughed.
“I can’t wait for you to see their store.”
“You sure these guys are legit?”
Zach said, “Hey, would I want to get you in trouble?”
“I’m already in trouble up to my ass.”
“Your gorgeous ass.”
“Bad guys spot us a mile away.”
“I told you—” But we’d already reached the door.
Old brick building, a tall one-story. Sunflower solar panels decked the roof—building permit was in order—but the rest of the place seemed to date from when Lincoln was president.
Jen said, “God, it looks like they made buggy whips here.”
I said to her, No, they made—
But she snapped at me, I told you to keep quiet.
Zach ushered us inside.
It was a high-ceilinged room. Except for a few windows way up and shelves at the back, three walls were totally covered by a display of tools and machines arrayed in amazing patterns and colors: typewriters of every vintage, sewing machines, transistor radios, hand-cranked adding machines, abacuses, electric mixers, toasters, a gizmo for milking cows, vibrators, electric drills and handsaws, wood-handled chisels, hammers, screwdrivers, clunky plastic telephones, colored pencils, paintbrushes, can openers, and wire whisks. As we watched, objects moved up or down, left or right, as if the walls were giant Rubik’s cubes. Shapes created patterns, patterns split apart and reshaped by object, color, or size, and then fell apart to form others linked by theme. Good times.
Never before had I felt Jen’s mind go completely still. We were gawking, drinking in the whole thing, but it was as if her mind was so flooded that she couldn’t register a
thing.
She whispered to Zach, “You said this was a computer store.”
“Look,” said Zach, pointing straight up. Square Japanese paper lanterns, made of thin white rice paper mounted on balsa wood frames, covered the whole ceiling. Each glowed pastel shades from a light tucked inside: warm yellows, a robin’s-egg blue (not that we had many robins left this far south), a flamingo pink.
Right behind us, a woman’s voice said, “Repurposed OLED phone displays.”
We hadn’t even noticed any people, but now we looked around. Sitting at workbenches were maybe twelve or fourteen people assembling or repairing computers and phones.
A gray-haired woman came over to us, and Zach introduced Jen to Mary Sue. “Watch,” she said, and then, “Ceiling, do starry night for Zach and his friend.”
The windows turned opaque. What had been yellow and blue became a nighttime sky like I’d only seen pictures of: a quarter moon and the Milky Way sweeping across the heavens.
“Damn it, Mary Sue,” someone screamed in the half-dark. “I just about soldered my fingers.”
With a command, she returned the sky to those Degas shades of yellow, pink, and pale blue.
While Zach talked to Mary Sue about buying a used tablet, we gazed at the changing patterns of machinery and gadgets on the walls. Jen silently picked out objects and guessed which way they were going to shift. I was certain I detected a code that used the colors of the machinery and positions on the grid to signify letters of the alphabet. But it was gibberish in every language I knew, and I concluded my secret code was coincidence.
We wandered along the aisles of the workspaces. No one objected and some folks smiled and said hi. Except one woman over to the side, speaking softly on the phone. She had thick black hair pulled into a long braid that snaked down her back like a sleeping python. No emotion flickered on her face as she studied Jen, but she turned off the tablet she’d been scribbling on.
* * *
“What the hell was that?” Jen asked. We were back outside, standing against sun-warmed brick.
The Last Exit Page 2