I groaned, suddenly and loudly. “We don’t even fucking know.”
“What?” Lila said.
“We don’t even know if he needs rescuing.”
“What?” Lila said, louder. “You were the one who said they had him imprisoned.”
I drank more of the whiskey. Closed my eyes. “I said I saw doctors working on him. Doctors helping him. I said he was alive. Sick maybe, but millions of people are sick.”
Dolores, Lila, and I were kidding ourselves. We weren’t detectives. We weren’t solving anything. We weren’t bringing down a rotten corporation and corrupt government.
“He didn’t even care,” I said, too quietly, staring at the wall. “He didn’t care I was there. He looked at me like I was a stranger.”
We were up high, but it felt like the entire world could collapse on top of me. I closed my eyes again and felt smaller. More trapped. The case was a fishing net and when I dragged it up, somehow I was the creature caught inside.
Dolores was looking at me. “Kobo,” she said, walking over. “What do you want to do?”
I looked at my injured palm, a hard shell of blue sealant in the middle where the grub beacon had been ripped out. One of the fingers already missing. I couldn’t even fully close my hand. I was never going to be whole and healed. My whole body was tired, covered in bruises. It felt like someone had ripped all my nerves out at the root, tossed them on the pavement, and watched them shrivel up in the sun.
I pulled out an eraser. Had to steady my hands to get it lit.
“Are you going to let the Mets poison him again? Over and over?” Lila said.
“Do you want us to go in there, Kobo?” Dolores said.
“Do you want to let him get away with it?” Lila said.
I was breathing so heavily the eraser was already a smoldering nub. I twisted the end onto the railing.
I couldn’t forget how Zunz had forgotten me.
I stood up, my face red and hot. “Who have I been kidding? The brother I grew up with is gone. I don’t know anything about his life now. We see each other a few times a year, at most. What do I know about him anymore? He didn’t tell me about you, Lila, that’s for sure. He’s had a child for a dozen years and never told me. He didn’t even tell me he hadn’t died. Who doesn’t tell their brother they’re alive? Zunz is alive. He has doctors. He has more money in the bank than I’ll ever see. He has fans and fame and multiple apartments. He doesn’t need me. He doesn’t need any of us.”
I walked back inside. Grabbed my coat and bag.
“I need to go home. Rest. Think,” I said. Then I added, “Alone.”
Lila and Dolores were small, dim figures in the balcony box.
“So that’s it?” Lila shouted weakly.
“Call me if Zunz dies a second time.”
38
THE INTERRUPTED SLEEP
Landlord wants your rent, Kobo,” the super said as I rushed past.
“Landlord is an algorithm hosted in a server farm in the Arizona desert.”
“Hey, man. Just letting you know. Eviction next week.”
I walked past him. My mind was a hunk of ice in a frozen sea. Next week wasn’t a concept capable of thawing it.
“What the hell was that noise the other day?” the super yelled after me.
When I got to the apartment, the door was broken. So were most of the things inside.
Everything I owned was smashed or splintered. My furniture lay in piles of rubble. Clothes were strewn around the room. The floor tiles were cracked along with the windows. The Sassafras sisters had been thorough, that was for sure. An eviction wouldn’t do anything except save me money on a cleaner.
Still, I felt calm. I was home. My own home where I didn’t need anyone and they didn’t need me.
Plus, I had three brand-name booster shots I’d purchased on the way home with Natasha’s money. I sat on the remains of my couch and rolled up my sleeve. Opened the packaging carefully. The warning label said not to take more than one a day. I didn’t care. I slid in the needles one after another, then sat back. Smiled as the upgrades worked their way through my veins.
The only sound in the apartment was the dripping of the broken kitchen faucet. I took a warm beer from the broken fridge. Cracked it open, drank it in one gulp. I started to undress. Laid my clothes neatly on the torn-up bed. Its microfoam guts had been ripped out and tossed around the room like a dusting of snow.
In the bathroom, I scrubbed the dirt of the case off my skin with soap wool. Took a buff cloth to my arm and crotch. I cleaned each part of myself separately, metal and flesh. I didn’t think about how they did or didn’t fit together. I didn’t think about whole things at all. I was working a piece at a time. I rubbed each separate piece hard enough to clean off the last dozen days.
Most of my appliances had been smashed, with their little metal and plastic guts strewn across the floor. But the trimmer still worked. I cropped my hair to the skull. Scraped off my stubbly beard. In the remains of my mirror, I saw someone squeaky and clean. The skin shining along with the metal.
I stumbled back into the bedroom, dropped down on the ruined mattress. Let the foam conform to my indentations, the tiny self-inflating balls cradling my weight. I closed my eyes, ready to sleep for as long as possible. A nice big sleep.
Darkness wrapped around me. Countless black threads hugging me and hiding me from the world like a cocoon. Maybe I could sleep until everything had changed. Until the world was a different place and I could wake up in a new reality. A new life.
But even as I was falling asleep, Zunz wouldn’t leave me. I couldn’t help replaying it in my mind. Him on the stretcher at the stadium, not caring that I was there.
Then I noticed something in my mind’s eye that smacked me awake. Zunz. The one I’d seen in the stadium. It wasn’t him.
I pulled up the actual recording of the stadium in my bionic eye. Replayed. Zunz was in the gurney, helmet on and eyes open. I zoomed in, right to the blotch above his dimple. I was right. I didn’t know how, but it wasn’t my brother.
When I called Dolores, her holographic face was frowning.
“I can’t believe you just left us, Kobo.”
“I’m sorry. I’m an asshole. But I was wrong. About everything. That wasn’t Zunz.”
“What?” Dolores yawned. She pulled on her goggles. I must have woken her. She sat up in her bed.
“At the game, it wasn’t him. I don’t know if he was a clone or what, but it was someone else.”
“You can’t just duplicate a person like a file. Remember the astroclones? They took a year to grow and went insane anyway.”
“Well maybe it was another player with heavy cosmetic surgery, but I know it wasn’t him. I saw his birthmark. The one that looks like a tiny baseball glove.”
“What about it?” Dolores said.
“It was backward.”
I saw Dolores’s mouth open and heard Lila yell off view. Then Dolores’s head shrank to a dot. She blinked out. The pad had shut off.
I tried to turn it on, call again, but it wasn’t working.
I heard a smacking sound, like steak slammed on a counter. Smack, smack, smack. I realized it was a pair of gigantic hands clapping. “It’s inspiring,” a deep, smooth voice said. “Seeing the rat in the maze round the proper corner.”
The sound was coming from the corner, but all I could see was a mound of black clothes and rubbish from the Sassafras sisters’ ransacking. Then my eyes adjusted, and I noticed shapes swirling in the black. The shape stood up. A shadow stretching to the ceiling.
“Kobo, Kobo, Kobo,” the dark form said. As it moved forward, more colors swirled around the head of the shape. “May I call you Kobo?”
The darkness touched itself, and a ripple of maroon ran across it. Blue and green dots were dappling it now. Then I heard a click and the colors went away, turned translucent so I could see the face underneath. A man’s face. Pale and featureless like a new thing being born. But he wasn’t
new.
Coppelius pulled off his cephalopod hood and tossed it on the bed beside me. He was holding a green comm blocker in his other hand.
“I’m glad you and I will have a chance to talk one-on-one,” Coppelius said. His thin smile showed only the tips of his teeth.
I was fully awake now, and I reached behind me to grab the gun I kept under the pillow.
“No need to do that.” Coppelius had it in his hand. He snapped off the barrel and tossed the two halves back into the mess of the closet. “I cleared the room hours ago. You don’t need to think about weapons. Just relax. Let’s talk business. Duty to your country. Profit.”
I hadn’t seen Coppelius this close before. Only from across the deck of a sushi restaurant or the Mouth’s office, his face hiding in the shadows. Here, I could see his Neanderthal features were there, but ill formed. An unfinished sculpture. His large brow was hairless, with large blue eyes in the sockets underneath. His head was smooth as an egg.
“We’ve got nothing to talk about. I’m off the case. Or the case is off me.”
“Is that so?”
“I’ve been fired. I don’t work for the Mets anymore.”
“What a coincidence, I don’t work for them either. They only think I do. Still, Natasha and I have some interests that align with theirs. Yours do too.”
Coppelius walked toward me slowly, but with inevitability. He seemed to be the walking embodiment of my failures. My failure to escape my past, failure to transcend my body, failure to even solve a simple murder.
“You win,” I said. “Kill me. Put the shitty bow on the end of this shitty life.”
“Self-pity is very boring, Kobo. Do you think we Neanderthals don’t have oceans of pity we could swim in? A whole species’ worth?”
Coppelius sat on the edge of the mattress. He didn’t have a gun, but he didn’t need one. He reached out a hand, which was still sheathed in cephalopod fabric and looked like a tentacle from the deep. He grabbed my naked foot. Rubbed the bare skin roughly.
“I don’t care about baseball. But I still do things for the good of my team. For my people, few as we are in this sapien world. Don’t you like feeling like a part of a cause greater than yourself?”
“Not these days.”
“You need a team, Kobo. You’re no good on your own.”
“That’s what my mother used to say.” I was looking around the room for something blunt enough to bash into his head. My suicidal feelings had passed, panic was setting in. I sat up in bed, pushing myself to the wall with my injured hand. Coppelius let my leg slip from his hand. “Are you going to kill me like you killed Kang?”
Coppelius’s lips stretched wide, curling at the ends. “I’m here for your help, and to help you. I’m a helpful guy. Kang didn’t want to help. He didn’t have the necessary empathy. Empathy is a natural Neanderthal trait.” He smiled, spread out his hands. The palms were as big as plates. “I have so much love inside me, you wouldn’t believe. I’m bursting with love.”
I laughed. A frightened little yip.
“Laugh, but it’s true. You want to help JJ Zunz. I want to help JJ Zunz. We want the same thing.”
“You’re mistaken. I didn’t want cro-mag spooks hiding in my bedroom.”
“We’ve been tracking someone you happened to stumble upon. I have to admit I didn’t think you would when Natasha suggested hiring you. We had a bet. I thought you were employed more as…” He cocked his floating head. “A concession, you might say. But Natasha believed in you. She believed humans with, let’s say less than ideal lives, will latch on to any meaning they can find. A friend’s murder, say. Natasha has spent a lot of time studying the psychology of sapiens.”
“I led you to Lila.”
“Yes, that is her name.” His smile grew even wider. He clapped his hands. “Now, give me Lila and I’ll be able to help Zunz. Then Zunz will be able to help Natasha and me.”
“That wasn’t Zunz. I know it wasn’t.”
“You are right. The person you saw wasn’t Zunz. But the real Zunz is very much alive, and he needs the girl’s help.”
“If he’s alive he doesn’t care about her.”
Coppelius sucked in his pale lips. “Maybe not. But his body does. Zunz’s body needs something from Lila’s body to live. Something vital, if painful to remove.”
“His body?”
“We’re all trapped in these forms, aren’t we? Our minds get poured into them without anyone even asking us. We grow and live in them, and yet in many ways they are as incomprehensible to us as the cosmos.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I can’t get into the specifics. You and I are not scientists in any case. She has genes in a pure form. Much of them anyway. She can donate her cells to put in his body. Something that hasn’t been corrupted in her. You wouldn’t believe how easily the strands of your DNA fray with all the poisons you sapiens put into yourselves.”
“Why now?”
Coppelius laughed, his head bobbing in the darkness around him. “Well, you saw what happened when he was playing the White Mice. There might be risks for her, but then nature is a cruel thing.”
“This isn’t nature.”
“It’s life. Whatever you want to call it. Was it cruel when your ancestors bashed in my ancestors’ skulls with rocks and sticks? Her cells may be the key to unlocking a mystery Monsanto wants to unlock. That President Newman wants to unlock. And that Natasha and I very much need to unlock. That’s what’s important.” Coppelius spread his arms. They were as wide as steel beams. “And in return you will be rewarded. Your medical-loan debt is nothing to Monsanto. Pennies lost in a couch.”
I’d worked my way back to my haunches, ready to spring. I had another gun hidden in the closet. A big fat one to shoot at a big thick thug. At least if the Sassafras sisters hadn’t found it during their rampage. If I could leap around Coppelius, I could get to it before he realized. Shut up his talk about nature with a bit of technology.
“I don’t know where Lila is. You’re right that she’s nothing to me. I thought she was involved in Zunz’s murder. But there never was any murder. So I let her go.” I kept babbling, hoping to keep him talking and distracted. I got ready to make a move.
“You know I don’t believe that.”
I closed my eyes and then shouted for the lights to turn on at full power. Light flooded the room and I jumped into Coppelius with my shoulder. Metal to prehistoric jaw. Knocked him off the bed. I got to the floor. Ran.
I made it through the door and into the hall. Then I was facedown on the floor, my left leg held in the air behind me. He had my ankle. Coppelius clucked. “Why do you have to make everything so dramatic?”
Coppelius twisted my ankle with a series of wet cracks.
I shouted into the floor.
He hit the back of my head. My teeth smacked the floorboards. I felt blood trickle out of my nose.
Coppelius knelt on my back and took hold of my right arm. He pulled it back toward him. “This looks expensive. If you want to keep it, tell me where Lila is.”
Time started to move slowly and angrily. Coppelius pushed one knee into my shoulder, pulled the arm farther back. Then farther still. I could feel the flesh of my shoulder screaming where it was attached to the metal.
“Okay,” he said, still twisting. “Now is your moment of decision. Do you want to help your team, your country, and be handsomely rewarded for it? Do you want life, health, and fulfilment? Or do you want dismemberment and destitution?”
Even with my face bleeding on the floor and my arm screaming in pain, I couldn’t help but think of the numbers. The medical debt I owed, and the cost of the upgrades I wanted. They piled up into a massive heap. Numbers on top of numbers. Stacked in a tower tall enough to collapse on me and crush me. And I could imagine them being wiped away, like a small stain with a towel, leaving me a clean slate. A completely new beginning.
And then I thought of Zunz. Of Lila. Of Dolores.
&
nbsp; I spat up a little blood.
“Fuck you,” I said.
Coppelius didn’t respond. Not with words.
There was more pain and then a loud crack. My arm and socket parting, like a giant suction cup being removed.
Raindrops of blood fell around me. My blood.
I tried to move my right hand. There wasn’t a hand there to move. I tried again.
Neither my mind nor my body could accept what was happening.
Coppelius was on my back. I was struggling under him, barely moving. My right arm was still attached to my shoulder by wires and cords. I heard a click, a series of pops, then a great screeching tear.
“Here you go, Kobo.”
My arm landed in front of me with a dull thud.
39
THE SEPARATED ARM
I was on the floor trying to crawl. The jagged stump of my right arm rotated pointlessly. My mind didn’t seem to realize part of me was no longer part of me. It was a foreign object across the floor. I looked at my arm. It was a few inches from my face. The end was a mess, wires spilling out like guts. There was the smell of sizzling blood. The fingers tapped on the ground, some last electric pulse working through the wires. Blue fluid stained the floor.
I heard noises around me. Running water. A door opening. Footsteps. Guffaws.
My head was screaming. Electricity sputtered in my skull. My only thought was to be whole again. To put my arm back in its proper place. I started to crawl toward it.
I managed to pull myself within reach of it.
I grabbed air. It was gone.
“Look at this thing,” a voice above me said.
“This whole place is filthy. You’re a filthy little pig.”
“Why’s he all naked and bloody?”
Two sets of feet stood in front of me. Someone grabbed one of my armpits, then the other. I was lifted to my knees.
“Oink! Oink! That’s the sound you make, Kobo.” I was face-to-face with Wanda Sassafras. Brenda was behind her, inspecting my severed arm.
My sight was going in and out of focus. Then they were blurs. Big ugly ones.
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