by Andrew Post
Thadius, in tux, tails, and top hat all striped in cheery colors of the big top, walked to the center of the stage. Behind him, music swelled: the beginning riffs of “Brain Stew.”
Beaming at his attendees, he adjusted the mic clipped to his lapel and said, “Welcome. Everyone who’s come out tonight and everyone who’s tuned in at home”—he bowed deeply and came back up—“I welcome you to the Siren House.” After completing his intro, Thadius exited stage right and the first skit began at once. The crowd was so engaged you could hear a pin drop.
I’d watched for a few minutes when I heard footsteps coming up the balcony stairs. A top hat slid up along the railing, and the mustachioed face of Thadius peeked over. He scanned around until he saw me. I waved, but he didn’t return it. He was almost scowling. He jerked his head to the side, summoning me downstairs, and disappeared.
After fumbling with my crutches through the row and accidently falling into the lap of one man, I got to the stairs.
Passing through the lobby bar again, I saw Beth clearing a table of glasses and plates. Our eyes met, and I could see her put it together: Thadius walking ahead and me following. She winked at me. I didn’t understand why.
Outside, it was surprisingly chilly. When we were a few yards from the theater, Thadius stopped so I could sit down on the curb to get my sweater out of my backpack. He didn’t ask if I needed any help. He just watched as I fought to put on the sweater, pushing my head into one of the sleeves not once but twice. I guess I didn’t really want him to ask, but I was more surprised that he didn’t. He lit a pipe, puffed on it, checked his pocket watch, scanned the street up and down.
If what he said was true about the Smocks burning scratchers, I guessed he was just nervous I’d put everyone who loved him in their sights. Which, when thinking about how many people were at the theater, seemed to be just about everyone in town.
“Good?” he asked when I finally got myself back on my feet. I nodded.
We went a few more blocks. Thankfully they weren’t uphill. A winding path navigated around burnt-down houses and the occasional shantytown, the sidewalk appearing and disappearing a number of times. It was really grown over in places, to the point it felt like we were walking on squares of green carpet.
“So, tell me,” he said between puffs, slowing so we were moving along side by side, “how’d you get in with Mosaic Face, anyway?”
I’ll admit I was nervous and I rambled. “Well, my sister’s boyfriend would send us these videos he found online and sent us Mosaic Face’s because he, my sister’s boyfriend, Alan, thought they were hilarious: this guy with his pixilated head and his voice all autotuned, spouting his conspiracy theories. And I started really listening to them and I—”
“Yeah, Mosaic Face’s approach to learnin’ people about things is certainly unique. Gots to admire it, him stickin’ to his shtick like that.”
“Shtick? What do you mean?”
“Well, in my experience, if you want to sell someone a big idea and root out the unbelievers, best way to do it is to present your message in the goofiest way possible. Dog pill in the peanut butter, right? With him autotuning his voice and blurrin’ up his mug, you’d have to already be at least partway convinced in what he was sayin’ beforehand to buy any of what he was tryin’ to tell you.”
“I believed him. Not at first, no, but after my dad and I . . .”
Thadius stopped. He turned to face me but only after looking up the street one way and down the other. We were two blocks up from the Siren House. It was shining like a beacon in among so many dark, unoccupied buildings around it. “All right. Go ahead,” he said, “Just keep it down.”
It felt like each time he gestured for me to speak, he was clicking a stopwatch. “My dad found the machine where we were living. After some messing around with it, we figured out it was a molecular deconstructor reconstructor. Actually, my dad was the one who figured it out. Either way, we put my stuffed animal Squishy through, broke him down, rebuilt him, and—”
“I know how it works. So you saw the video where Mosaic Face had the two vases on the table. He said if anyone knew the significance of there bein’ two vases, you should write in. You and your pops found a machine, figgered out what it was, and . . .” He rolled his hand on his wrist.
“Because there were never two of those vases,” I said. “Only one was ever made, and since the second one was so perfectly identical, with all the same chips and bubbles and stuff in the same places, it couldn’t have been a reproduction. I knew Mosaic Face had to have done it using a cauldron, so I wrote him. And he told me to meet you here.”
Thadius motioned for me to hush. A rhythmic clopping approached. Turning, I saw a makeshift carriage, a U-Haul trailer pulled by sorrel ponies. The bearded man sitting atop tipped his hat, and Thadius returned the gesture. On the trailer’s side, Cletus’s Pony Express was slapped on with white paint. On the back: Don’t even think about it—driver is very much armed.
Once the carriage was out of earshot, Thadius said, “And how’d you know just one of them was made—the vases?”
“Well, I went online and did a search of vases. Took a couple of days, but I found a closed auction and saw it was a reproduction of a one-of-a-kind flower vase. It looked similar but not the same, so I started looking up pottery made by that company and found the one Mosaic Face had on the table in the video, the exact one. It was a priceless collector’s item, only one of them ever got made before the factory burned down. Because he had two, I figured he must’ve used a molecular deconstructor reconstructor, or cauldron,” I said, with flash, in the know, “to make a copy of it and—”
“You puzzled it out. Goody. And then he said you could possibly join the fight. Got it. Now you tell me somethin’, girlie: why?”
“Why . . . what?”
“What do you mean, why what? Why join the goddamn fight? I mean, look at you. Is this goin’ to heal?” He waved his pipe stem at my legs.
“No, it’s not.”
His face crumpled. “You sure?”
What kind of question was that? “Pretty sure. Doctors don’t typically say permanent condition unless they mean it.”
“Still. You expect to be able to be a part of a fight . . . as a cripple? I mean, don’t let me hurt your feelings or anything here, but I just want to save you from gettin’ your heart broke. Why get your head all wrapped up in wantin’ to be a scratcher? This life, while it may sound excitin’, most of the time, even I don’t think it’s worth it.”
“You don’t need legs to operate a machine,” I said. “Or to input recipes, to press the harvest and scan buttons.”
“True, but you sure as hell need legs to run away when they find out what you do.” He cut himself short. “Here’s what I think,” he said, softer now. “Forgive that about calling you a cripple, but I just think you and your daddy found a cauldron—which, in itself, is no big deal since Flashcraft apparently had the damn things stashed all over the place—and you turned it on. You made your little stuffed animal disappear, and you rebuilt him. Congrats, but I’m willin’ to bet dollars to donuts you ain’t never actually jazzed anythin’ before.”
He searched my face as if waiting for that term to trigger my confusion and make it spring out. I didn’t let it, even though, yes, it wanted to. Jazzed?
He laughed. Apparently I didn’t hide it well enough.
“I’ve jazzed things before.”
“Too late, girlie. I saw that. Callin’ yourself a scratcher without knowin’ how to jazz would be like claimin’ you’re a concert pianist when all you really know is ‘Chopsticks.’ Learn to bluff.”
“I said I can jazz.”
Thadius tapped the ashes out of his pipe against his heel, then ran a finger around inside the pipe. He spoke while performing this chore as if I didn’t even deserve his full attention. “Listen,” he said, wiping his blackened fingertip off on a hankie, “I think you’re a sweet kid. And maybe Mosaic Face is getting desperate. No offense. B
ut since you think this won’t be getting better anytime soon”—head down, he gestured at my legs—“you’d be best off goin’ back home and tellin’ your daddy Mr. Thadius said you two should leave the scratcher business to the—”
“My dad’s dead.”
Another lie. No, I didn’t know for sure, but he might as well be. He felt dead to me, at any rate, even before he left.
“This is all I’ve got,” I said. “This. Doing this. Trying to fix things. I got this, and I got my cabbage patch back home.” I accidentally motioned a crutch toward Lake Superior, and Thadius turned, glancing out at the water. But before he could ask anything, I said, “I just want to help because—”
“You in town here? Because you motioned that way. And there ain’t nothin’ that way ’cept the beach, and ain’t no one dumb enough to try to sleep there unless they’re wantin’ to have trouble find them.”
“Fine, all right. The oil rig right out there?” I pointed. “That’s mine.”
“Do you still need help?” Thadius asked.
“Not anymore,” I said. “I’m here to offer it, though.”
“Nice segue.”
“Listen.” I sighed. “I’m good with it. I don’t know if it means anything, but the machine I have is a model six. There’s nothing online about Flashcraft Industries anywhere. I looked, but on the side of it, there’s these numbers, and I figured out it’s a product number, and—”
“You know how you even have the Internet at all, girlie? Me . . . I did that. It may be only Web 0.5 and run slower than shit, but that was me. So don’t go actin’ like you came across some copy-site I don’t know about. I was part of the Internet anthropological archivists before the A. And of the sites we managed to dupe and save, I know each one like the back of my hand. You know half that stuff’s older than you, right?”
“Yeah, most of the sites are dated from a few years ago, but—”
“They ain’t live sites. They’re dead pages. Copies, nowhere links, and broken images but still mine. All of ’em on a drive, in the Siren House basement. Figgered you should know before you go off spoutin’ about how much you know and how good of a keyboard cowgirl Nancy Drew you think you is.”
“Why were you archiving the Internet?”
“Because we knew the A was comin’. Well, Mosaic Face did. I just sorta believed it was. And though most of it was cat photos and Rick Rolling and memes and pop culture bullshit, it was still the closest complete record of what our civilization used to be. Like that heap of junk they left up on the moon—a representation of the human race. Ain’t pretty; you don’t need to tell me—in its prime the Internet was 97 percent porn.”
I blushed. I’d looked some of that up once too. Little did I know it’d be peeled out from the basement of the Siren House. It made me look at Thadius differently, knowing he’d seen what I’d seen. Knew as much as I knew of the pre-A Internet. Even the ugly stuff, the wealth of information. It’s like meeting someone who mentions they like the same restaurant you do and go there all the time, as often as you, but you’ve never run into them. And when you do, there—I’d think—should be this instant rapport. But while I felt a connection with Thadius, knowing he knew the copied Web pages probably as well as I did, I still felt like a stranger. Like while he was a frequent visitor to that information as well as me, we’d been using it in different ways. Better ways. Putting what he learned to good use. Unlike me, farting around, looking at photos of puppies—who were all long dead, I sadly realized—he was using what he found to build an army.
“Wait, so when I was sending direct messages to Mosaic Face, that means they weren’t really going anywhere—”
“Here,” Thadius said and dipped a hand into his pocket. He produced a small gunmetal-gray thing, approximately the size and shape of a thumb. A USB flash drive. “You said you had a Squishy doll, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, holding the flash drive, still warm from being inside his pocket. “From the show Dr. Werewolf & Squishy. But what’s—”
“Yeah, I know it. I think you’ll like something that’s on there. Take that home, find the file—you’ll know which one I mean when you see it—run it, and bring back what it gives you to me.”
“Okay.” I put the drive in my pocket and zipped it closed so it wouldn’t fall out.
“Now, hold your horses. You’re goin’ to need more than that. You need fixins too. If you head down that a way, past the theater, make a right, and then go into the alley behind my place, you’ll find a couple of loose bricks by the lamppost. You’ll know which one I mean. Now, make sure no one sees you when you take those bricks out,” he stressed, as if I were dumb, “and inside there’ll be a couple of canisters. Take the one with the yellow check mark on it, put it in your little bag you got there—do not walk around carryin’ it in your hand—and go and plug it and the flash drive into your machine.”
“I can help, then?”
He held up a hand. “This is a test. Not just of you but of your equipment too. Flashcraft put out a few duds, and I just want to make sure yours is up to snuff before I even consider lettin’ you further behind the curtain than you already been. Do that, and come back in a week. Should probably take that about that long to print.”
“What’s on it?” I asked, running my hand over the lump of the drive in my pocket.
“It’s a surprise. Now get goin’. Wait—your name.” He seemed to wince while waiting for me to answer.
“Cassetera Robuck.”
When I tell most people my name, I have to spell it or say it three or four times really slow. He didn’t need me to. Instead, Thadius looked relieved, oddly enough. He quickly replaced the expression with one that seemed to say, Not bad. Not bad at all.
“Showing promise already,” he said, still making the impressed face, “comin’ from parents who were clearly creative types. I hear it’s in the genes—creativity. Let’s just hope it didn’t skip a generation.”
We walked back together, Thadius in the lead. In front of the Siren House, he tipped his hat, I waved a hand slightly above a crutch handle, and we parted ways.
I moved quickly. Being out alone in Duluth was bad enough during the day. Every shadow seemed to have eyes.
In the alleyway round back, I found the cache of “fixins” canisters. In completely unremarkable brushed steel, each about the size of a soda can, they were all heavier than they looked. I sifted through before finding the one with the hand-painted yellow check mark. Nail polish? I made sure no one was watching, tucked the canister into my backpack, put the bricks back the way I found them, and turned to leave.
I stopped at the back door of the Siren House before moving on. Inside, I could hear applause. The Siren House was doing its send-off. I heard Thadius shouting to the audience, saying he loved them and encouraging them to tune in next time. The song playing was an incongruously upbeat rendition of “Without You.” I’d soon learn they ended every show with it.
More cheers and thank-yous and a patient stampede of the audience filtering out. When I heard feet approaching the stage exit door, I was quick to move on.
I clack-thumped down the hills toward the boardwalk, taking the sidewalks and stopping at crosswalks and looking both ways, despite the precious little traffic. Some donkey carts, a couple of people on bicycles with helmet-mounted headlights. Then something made me stop.
A matte-black, angular vehicle with no windshield approached silently, seemingly propelled by the softest of breezes. I watched as it glided past, feeling a thousand eyes looking out at me. Every block it passed, the people on the street abandoned barrel fires or clapboard stands. Someone on crutches can’t exactly run, so I did the deer-in-the-headlights thing and stared as it hummed past. It slowed, as if to estimate me, a guppy to a shark. Finding me not worth the time or effort, apparently, it continued on, humming that dull, unending note and moving over rubble and gravel and trash without a sound. It turned a corner and was gone.
After shaking off the scare, I
threw my crutches forward and crossed the street. The stairs to the boardwalk were slick from mist, but I struggled down them without incident. I half expected to see the guy with the glasses and scarf again, but the beach was completely abandoned. I was thankful, nervous as I was carrying what I had in my bag. Did they burn people who were just carrying the paraphernalia of scratching, too? I didn’t want to find out. I was also thankful no one had stolen my rowboat. I got in and started toward the rig, home.
It may’ve been because the path was mostly downhill from the Siren House to the beach, but even with the weight of the canister in my backpack, I’d clack-thumped faster than I had in years. I couldn’t help but let out a tiny whoop as I rowed through the cold, dark water. I was going to join this fight, by gum. Even if it killed me.
Track 4
SCRATCH
From the dock underneath the rig, I took the stairs that led up to the dining hall. The rig, my home, was the size of an entire department store if it’d been dropped onto cement pylons. A good majority of the rig’s square footage was industrial: pump rooms, machinery rooms, maintenance rooms, offices. Several layers high, the derrick in the middle where the actual oil drilling used to take place, the entire place fuzzy with lightning rods and antennae. The remaining portion was the barracks: a few bedrooms crowded with triple-stacked bunk beds, a galley kitchen, a pantry with a stainless-steel door that, still, even after seven years, had some cans left in it thanks to Mom’s staunch rationing, a living room of sorts, a rec room with a foosball table and a dusty N64, a gym, and a dining hall big enough to comfortably sit fifty-plus people.
Once in, door locked and double-checked, I shrugged off Dad’s green hoodie, strapped on my harness, latched on, and zipped down the stairwell, bypassing stairs entirely. I threw out my crutches ahead of me to break my fall, detached, and continued on. I’d done this so many times it was second nature, the thrill of the speedy zip-line descent long gone, sadly. I used the exterior catwalks to get to the easternmost side of the rig, passing through the helipad garden and into the rig works itself. Everything here was slick with old oil, and it smelled weird—like machinery, burnt dust—though normally I hardly noticed it. I guess all it took was a little time away to forget. As bad as it was, I found it oddly comforting. It was home.