"I'm ... not sure yet,” she said, although she was sure. “Don't worry about it. Listen, what is the novel about? Why don't you pitch it to me?” She laughed, uneasy. It had been a long time since Roger had had to pitch anything.
"I...” Roger stopped, and the agent could hear him fumbling for a drink. “That novel was really, really early. I was still working as a bartender, you know? I was still trying to figure out what I needed to do, find my own voice ... It's like I put everything I didn't want to become in that novel..."
"Wait, so it's not a thriller? It's not a Mick Solon book?” Mick Solon was Roger's prime character. Roger wrote series after series of Mick Solon books: Mick assassinating socialist governors, Mick putting newspaper editors on the rack, Mick breaking up Mexican farmers’ unions that threatened the state. Above all else, Mick was money.
"Well, not really ... I mean, it has a character named Mick Solon, but he's not the same..."
"Not the same?"
"He's a bit ... mellower."
"Christ, Roger. What am I supposed to do with this? Will you please tell me what the fuck it's about?"
"It's about relationships,” he said. He sounded embarrassed, and a bit surly. “There's a failing marriage. I'm pretty sure there aren't any terrorists in it? But, who the fuck cares. You're my agent. I want you to fucking assess it and sell it. Maybe I could go over it again, add a political subplot, a liberal suicide bomber? Maybe one of the characters has an affair with a sultan's daughter, who's actually been programmed to kill the Republican senator to make sure tax cuts don't go through, because the taxes are going to fund restoration of the caliphate?"
"I don't know, Roger. It sounds kind of retro. Stuck in the past?” The Republicans shattered with the constitution, like all else, like every other party, every other public interest.
"Well, it is set in the past. I'm just thinking out loud here. Look, you're my employee."
"Contractor."
"Whatever. Just transcribe the manuscript and figure out what to do with it."
"Fine.” She hung up on him. Then she called the front desk. She was going to work harder for this 25 percent cut than she ever had in her life.
"Security detail, please. I need to go to Kinko's."
She met the concierge in the front lobby. He was in urban camo and had a silver bag slung over his shoulder like a purse. She didn't want to know what he had in there. He was pretty much a kid. He must have thought she was ancient, and she knew he was trying not to stare at the cloverleaf radiation burn on her cheek.
"All right, ma'am,” he said, unholstering his sword and turning its crank to power it up. Ma'am. “Follow me."
They put on their masks. She crossed her arms and followed him out the door. He walked a few paces in front of her in the street. The Kinko's was only two blocks away, but she didn't want to take any chances. She clutched the notebook close to her chest. It was dusk, and the clouds cast shadows over the rowhouses of Queens, in one of the few sustainable neighborhoods left in the old boroughs. Glittering dust swirled around her feet. She almost slipped on the gangplank, and a few bicycles nearly ran her over, but the concierge barked at one of the cyclists as he passed, and the other that followed got the message. From the Starbucks on the corner of Vine and Polk, a teenage girl watched them pass. The Starbucks window was about a foot thick. She must have been a viceroy's daughter, or a sphere-of-influence envoy, right off the dirigible from China. The agent felt sorry for her, for having to live in this shithole. Lord Manhattan and his revolutionary army could only survive because of the influx of humanitarian aid from Africa and Asia, most of which he kept. And the tourism—plenty of brisk trade to the vaporized sites.
"We're here,” the concierge said, moving toward the storefront, looking up at the sky for any security breaches. The gangplank was short by about two feet, so the agent did her best to pick through the mud, coal, and fish bones in front of the Kinko's. Her shoes weren't the best. The concierge gave her a hand. His arm was like a steel beam that she gripped tightly.
"Thank you,” she said. He opened the door. She was paying for that courtesy, too.
When she went in the door, she saw that the couriers were waiting for her there, next to the scanners. There was no point in running.
They let her scan the documents and send them to Amar, though. She was surprised about that. But they also said that an equal measure deserved equal measure. The courier she had Tasered was not there. The concierge thought about protecting the agent, but he was outnumbered five to one, and the couriers had these wiry, muscular bodies. And besides, they were under contract with Lord Manhattan, and he wanted no quarrel with him. He sheathed his sword.
"Stupid,” one of the couriers said as he held the agent down next to the paper cutter.
"You can hold her hand if you want,” another courier said to the concierge. The agent turned her head toward him, and her feet nearly slipped on the wet straw. She could see that he was contemplating leaving her there, and she started screaming and crying.
"What's got into you?” a courier said. “Hold still."
The concierge then took her hand, and she clenched it, dug her nails into him, to the point of almost striking blood. After that, she closed her eyes and could only hear their voices, and she wondered what Roger would think of her.
"Heat it up."
"We can't heat it up. Nothing to do that here ... none of these machines will do that."
"The bindery? There's a glue-heater on the top—"
"Fuck that. We don't have any pamphlets to bind. I'm not going to pay-n-pedal simply to sterilize an awl."
"Fine. Fine. I don't know if Marigold would really want to cause this one too much harm, though."
"She's not the best judge of that now, is she? She was stupid enough to get wounded."
Then they started arguing in Telugu.
Thirty seconds later the awl went through the agent's cheek, through the cloverleaf lesion, to the other side, scraping against her molars. Then she passed out, and the concierge let go of her hand.
Amar didn't know any of this. He was at the beach when he received the compressed files. His family was in the water, along with hundreds of other fathers’ families. Roger's novel tried to download to Amar's wristwatch, but the memory constrictions were too tight. He had worked with the agent before in the past, regarding Roger's increasingly erratic hand at writing. The agent always thought of Roger's hands shaking when he typed or dictated his novels, but Amar never got that sense. He only saw the information at hand.
He squinted at the file name report on his watch—the sun was bright—looking for clues. The scanners captured words in their filing nomenclature before downloading the scans in full at Amar's home: BARBARIAN 20-35.ppgr, DEVIL-ROCK.ppgr, LUCY-IS-AT-A-BAR 450?-.ppgr. More unusual gems: Knives ... a kiss ... more devils ... a hill with a cathedra...
"Early draft,” the agent had punched into the scanner, with fingers she could barely control, her face bandaged like a mummy's. “Please."
Amar's youngest son, Prius, came running up the beach toward him, from the bay, waving his arms like wings.
"Watch out for the glass!” Amar shouted, covering his watch with his other hand so that his son wouldn't splash any salt water on its face, large as a saucer.
"I saw an eel,” his son said as he got closer, panting heavily. “But I escaped it."
"I don't think there are any eels in these waters,” Amar said, looking out at the bay. “And the lifeguards would kill them on sight."
"Oh, but there are!” his son said, plopping down on the edge of the towel and pushing his feet into the gravelly sand. Amar winced and turned his body so the watch wouldn't face his son.
"If you say so,” he mumbled, giving a smile. Looking at his watch again at a slant, with the file names cascading on the screen, he wondered whether there was a glitch in the transfer. Nothing of the Eighth Client's files had ever looked like this before. The enjoyable voices on the beach kept murmuring ov
er him. Surely there were others like him here?
"You're not working, are you?” his wife said, putting a hand on his shoulder from behind. He flinched.
"You surprised me,” he said, looking down.
"You are working. Amar ... you need to take that stupid thing off.” She stood over him, blocking the sun, crossing her arms. He had met his wife at the Technical Freelance Armory, a few years after Mexico Moon, which in their vendor conglomerate's handbook was called the Strategic Reorganization of the Americas. She was in marketing services for a Bengali pharmaceutical company. She was shy but was finding her career voice over the last few years, after birthing the two children, traveling all over India and Africa to meet her production teams. She was a team leader in a way that Amar could never be. People thought he sounded like a woman on the phone!
"I really need to ... sorry,” he said. “Sorry.” He looked toward the bay, the spires of old Visakhapatnam out in the water. “Where's Puneet?"
"I thought he was getting rasgulla?” His wife looked back at the beach house, the snack bar, the Ferris wheel.
"No, no—he was with you in the water?"
"I wasn't in the water."
"He's swimming!” his younger son said. “Way out, near the towers."
"Puneet!” his wife shouted, running out to the water. Amar struggled to get his watch off, but the strap was caught on a hook. As he was fumbling, his mind drifted backward, into an undertow of time, and kept thinking: Why am I panicking? Is it because of her? Why is she panicking?
Back in the van—Amar was actually relieved that the trip to the beach was cut short by an imaginary emergency—Puneet was reluctantly explaining how he had been swimming out to the tower crowns to impress a girl. Who wasn't even Buddhist—his wife assumed, thinking out loud, working through the implications, because if this girl was Buddhist, he wouldn't have had need to impress her, on the breakwalls and ruins of the old port, because of their mutual understanding of their dual non being.
Puneet said nothing as they drove farther up into the hills, trees ripe with mango hybrids overhanging the road. Amar didn't dare venture into this emotional territory—he really couldn't care—of course, he was glad his son was safe, but he had no real doubts on this score in the first place. His wife also drifted into silence. But she had larger issues, which soon became clear after Amar glanced at his watch while driving. “I wish you wouldn't work with devils!” she said, looking straight ahead.
"Father works with devils?” his youngest said. “What are they like?"
"They're not devils."
"According to Nichiren they are,” his wife said.
Amar sighed and clenched the wheel of the van tighter. They had met at sangha within the technical college, chanting together. The sanghas were subsidized by the companies; after the Japanese diaspora, Nichiren Buddhism had found a home within the corporations of India. He found it as a way to get ahead, but she fell into Nichiren's teachings, more and more every year.
"We're not going to talk about that now,” Amar said.
"America is a poisoned land!"
"I've never met them, my beautiful wife,” he said between clenched teeth. “They're only contracts I have with them. Now let me drive."
That night, after his children and wife were asleep, he locked himself in his office with the novel. He had managed to survive the sullen hours after they returned from the beach—helping with dinner, chanting together for world peace, doing laundry while his wife helped Prius with his Mandarin homework. Sand was everywhere. Children on motorcycles sped by on their street, which his wife tut-tutted as she was getting ready for bed. Didn't their parents know this was a good Buddhist neighborhood?
"I can't sleep,” he said, sitting up after ten minutes.
"Amar, I love you."
"I know.” He kissed her forehead. The night sky was still. She was asleep when she said this. She would only say these words with such fierceness and warmth when she was dreaming.
He poured a Scotch—bottle kept in a secret drawer—and started downloading the scans from his watch. He had to enter the writer's world, and this usually wasn't an enjoyable process. It was never clear what an American writer was ever trying to say. Sometimes it made it easier to move the text along, toward a vision or instinct that Amar felt within the words, but sometimes this ambiguity was a dull wall, too thick to break. Tunneling underneath the text to the other side was the only option, but it was long and painstaking. This novel was, as Amar had feared, one of the latter cases.
If it could be called a novel. The beginning picked up in the middle of the action, in the middle of a dinner party. In a castle? Amar wondered if, perhaps, the agent had forgotten to send pages, but no—the author had clearly numbered each page of the manuscript with tiny, fastidious figures and dates, as if he had been trying to assert a timestamp control that was not there in the text itself:
...meeting Mick inside the cathedral was not Mary's cup of tea. She was afraid of it, how it loomed on the hill, the votive candles in the vestibule. She had been there before as a child. But Mick said it was the only safe place, where his wife wouldn't discover the true feelings for Mary that he had to keep secret.
"I have to see you,” he said. “That, or else I'll leave the city and backpack through Asia. You know, see the world. You may hear back from me or you may not."
"Fine. It's a deal, then,” she said.
Mick's wife had learned to read lips when she was in the foreign service. At the kitchen table, she read her husband's conversation as if it were a book. As Marigold walked up the hill to the cathedral—it was a pleasant path, lit with daffodils—she had no idea that Mick's wife was following twenty paces behind. Mick Solon was already there, lighting a candle and stuffing a dollar in the donation box, supposedly for his dead grandmother.
CHAPTER SIX: Please Don't Kill Me!
This was written more than twenty years ago. This was depressing, all the more depressing after the second Scotch. The handwriting was frantic. The pages had stains—from alcohol, no doubt. Writers like this one always drank. Amar converted the cursive to type, page by page, once he entered his handwriting algorithms. It would take a few hours.
He worked until morning. Decipherment and understanding were two different things, and he was nowhere near understanding when the morning bell rang six times. He could hear his wife wake and shuffle into the kitchen and then the shrine room. He thought about joining her but would not. One of his project managers from South Africa who always sent him work gave a head's up that a two-volume commentary on the Lotus Sutra, by some Zulu pop transhumanist he'd never heard of, was going to be coming his way in a few days; just a head's up.
He was almost falling asleep at his desk, the pages churning with due industry, when his scanner choked and stopped:
Larissa paused. “Do you really expect me to discuss politics, my lord?” she said, looking downward. And then her favorite Don Henley song started playing.
White paper on the facing page. The scanner was adjusting to the typography differential. A note was caught in the agent's original scan, pressed in the pages of the notebook. Clean, dark printing, could have been from a typewriter. Creased once in the middle. A logo in the upper center—a seal, to be exact. He recognized that seal. He wished he could have smelled the page.
He blew up the page and read the note, and then read it again more quickly, as if blurring his comprehension would somehow change the placement of the words into something far more innocuous. Then he grabbed the wastebasket underneath his desk and vomited into it. He could hear his wife keep chanting, and the crossing guard's whistle for school's first shift. His children were second shift but had half-internships that started at nine. They would be waking soon, and his wife would ready them, and Amar started crying.
Then he paused the scanner and called the agent. He wasn't even sure what time it was there, but he didn't care. He waited about a minute for someone to pick up, but it wasn't the agent. The room on
the other side was dark, and he could barely see the shapes: a lamp, a head, a gun. Then the head moved closer to the camera.
"Yes, hi?” the woman said. She was young, thin, had a bandaged face. Was chewing something. Kind of evil-looking, Amar thought. She dipped out of view again until she was just a shadow.
"Where's ... where's the resident of this property?” he said.
"Who are you?” she said.
"I'm a business associate of the woman who lives here. I need to speak to her."
"Oh,” she said. “Um...” She scratched her hair with both hands. “That's ... that's really not going to be possible. She's been taken to the Lord."
Marigold wasn't sure what to do with the man on the other side. The agent's apartment had been given to her as part of the punishment. They kept adding conditions onto the agent's punishment; Marigold wasn't sure how she felt about that. First the lancing—Marigold was squeamish about it, but fine, it had to be done. People wanted it done. Then the agent had been told she was free to go, but then Marigold's superior had put his mask back on and said, wait, Marigold needs some place to stay to recover, to convalesce, and Marigold wasn't going to make a big deal of it, but the rest of the couriers had thought it was only proper. Marigold had never really had a place of her own, just a couch in the couriers’ warehouse, on Staten Cape. The concierge—who had been quite cooperative during the entire justice operation in the Kinko's, all things considered—was beginning to balk at this, Marigold could tell. After all, the building was under his charge, and the couriers—even though they had the official backing of Lord Manhattan, with all the opportunities in the boroughs opened up to them—were beginning to press their luck a little, Marigold thought. But they insisted, and Marigold did need to sleep off all the excitement and the dull pain that was everywhere on her face, so she relented, and arrangements to move to the fifth floor were made. The concierge bit his tongue and gave the security card to Marigold. He also said to let him know if she “needed anything,” but she knew what he meant to say was: “I'll have my eyes on you."
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