by Matt Ruff
There must have been some splashing fairly recently, because the diving board was slick with moisture, and about halfway out Frankie decided that he’d be a lot more steady in his bare feet. He also decided that the middle of the diving board was not the best place to take his sneakers off, at which point the ghost of Jimmy Mireno called him a chickenshit, at which point Frankie entered a half crouch and raised his left leg. This did bad things to his center of gravity. Somehow he managed to get his left sneaker off without toppling, but when he tried to toss it to safety his balance wavered, and the sneaker plunked into the pool. Tailored to less exacting standards than a regulation Scouting hat, it sank.
“This is very much not good,” Frankie said.
One of the sliding glass doors on the villa opened and Salvatore came running out, so excited that he forgot to use his Russian accent.
“Hey,” he said, “hey Frankie, I just looked out the front and your car is gone!”
“What?” said Frankie.
“Hey,” said Salvatore, “what are you doing on the diving board?”
“What happened to my car?”
“How come you only have one sneaker on?”
“Salvatore, what happened to my freaking car?”
Salvatore shrugged. “It’s just gone. What are you doing on the diving board with only one sneaker, Frankie?”
“Trying to get that hat out of the water.”
“What hat?”
“That hat.”
“That’s a fin, Frankie.”
Frankie Lonzo hadn’t done a backwards somersault since third-grade gym class with Mrs. Petruski, but there’s nothing like a great white shark surfacing beneath you to give you total athletic recall. As Meisterbrau’s snout struck the underside of the diving board Frankie let his weight roll back, legs tucking up and over in classic form. He did it again, and again, not slowing even when he cracked the back of his skull hard enough to draw blood, though his perfect series of somersaults ended as a hands-and-knees scramble.
When his head cleared he was sitting on the deck up against the fence, as far back from the edge of the pool as it was possible to get without going out the gate. Salvatore was standing beside him, hands in pockets, with a grin on his face that made Frankie want to commit murder. The diving board was gone.
“Am I OK?” Frankie asked, checking himself for missing limbs. “Am I alive?”
Salvatore took his hands out of his pockets and held them about six inches apart. “By this much,” he said.
“The diving board. What the hell, did it eat the diving board?”
“Our fish has a big appetite.”
“Yeah. Bigger than you think, maybe.”
“It looked weird, Frankie.”
“What do you mean? Is it fatter?”
“Nah, not that. Just . . . different.”
Salvatore hooked his hands into claws and held them close to his chest. Frankie had no idea what this was supposed to mean, but he did know what they were going to do next. “Help me up,” he said. “My car’s gone, that’s fine, we’re catching a cab.”
“Where to?” asked Salvatore.
“Hardware store.”
11
It is now clear that Old World plagues killed at least half the population of the Aztec, Maya, and Inca civilizations shortly before their overthrow. . . . By 1600, after some twenty waves of pestilence had swept through the Americas, less than a tenth of the original population remained. Perhaps 90 million died, the equivalent, in today’s terms, to the loss of a billion. . . . When the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth, the Massachusetts and Wampanoag Indians had died so recently and on such a scale that the settlers found empty cabins and cleared fields waiting for their use.
—Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents
The Indians, in turn, learned much from the whites. . . . Many Europeans tried to understand the Indians’ ways and treated them fairly. But others cheated the Indians and took their land. . . . Thousands of Indians also died from measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, and other diseases brought by the whites.
—World Book Encyclopedia
2004: One Hand Washes the Other
Vanna Domingo wasn’t born mean. Though her subordinates in the Department of Public Opinion would never have believed it, she’d been a warm-hearted person once, private but kind, much given to laughter and spontaneous fits of dancing. Despite being orphaned at an early age, she’d managed to sustain a belief in the future for twenty-five years, until the events of a single fortnight turned her faith and trust irrevocably to ashes.
Her childhood was a hard-scrabble existence in a Connecticut coastal village. She learned early to tend to her own needs, as the fisherman uncle who served as her guardian was seldom home and showed no particular concern, positive or negative, for what became of her. That was all right with Vanna, who was independent by nature and saw the possibility of ultimate triumph reflected in the worst moments of loneliness and adversity. Just keep faith in tomorrow, she thought, and all else would surely follow, temporary setbacks notwithstanding. She drove herself to excel at school, taking whatever evening, weekend, and summer employment she could get to build up a few thousand dollars in savings. That and a Public Works Scholarship got her safely to Connecticut State University at Hartford, where she studied communications arts, specializing in human opinion engineering. She graduated into a depressed work market and spent seven months stumping for a job on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue, subsisting primarily on three-for-a-dollar packets of instant macaroni and cheese and “bargain-price, slightly defective” fruits and vegetables, which were all that she could afford. For recreation she went ice skating at Rockefeller Center on Saturday afternoons, using a pair of skates scavenged from a dumpster (a flirtatious turnstile attendant let her sneak into the rink for free); Sunday nights she square-danced at the Betsy Ross Saloon. She kept her morale up, survived two bouts of walking pneumonia, and finally found work in February of 2004, not on Madison Avenue but at a minority-owned advertising firm called Brainstorm. After this last turn of fortune her life began to improve in exponential leaps, as Vanna had always known and expected that it someday would.
Brainstorm was cutting edge, part of a general commercial and cultural rebirth in northern Manhattan that presaged a second Harlem Renaissance. A hungry young company with its roots in community-based public relations, Brainstorm had just begun to expand into national and international advertising when Vanna Domingo signed on. Its biggest client was another African-American-run business, Carver-Biotex Designer Foodstuffs, “the left-handed sugar people.”
Left-handed sugar was the final word in no-cal sweeteners: a molecular mirror image of ordinary “right-handed” sugar, it looked, bulked, and tasted like the real thing, the one key difference being that the human digestive tract had no enzymes that could break it down and absorb it. You could eat a ton of left-handed sugar without getting fat, and it didn’t cause cancer in laboratory rats, either. With saccharin and aspartame made effectively obsolete, Carver-Biotex stood to inherit the entire sugar-substitute market, and as the corporation grew, Brainstorm would grow along with it.
Vanna’s first assignment as an apprentice opinion engineer was with a Carver-Biotex/Brainstorm “think team” charged with dreaming up novel applications for the product. As she stirred half-and-half creamer into her coffee one morning, Vanna joked that they ought to mix equal parts left-and right-handed sugar and call it 50/50. The other members of the think team bounced the idea around and decided that such a hybrid might actually be helpful in attracting the significant minority of consumers who were reluctant to try new things. The meaningless but reassuring slogan Vanna came up with—“One Hand Washes the Other”—would encourage skittish members of the public to experiment with 50/50 first if they were nervous about switching outright to a whole new sweetener.
To make a long story short, 50/50 became a huge hit, not only with consumers but also with the sugar cane lobby, which up until 50/50’s debut had been thre
atening legislative action to protect its market share. Brainstorm rewarded Vanna with a raise and a promotion, and the president of Carver-Biotex sent her a twenty-pound box of left-handed sugar with a golden pour spout. Her team coworkers took her out for a round of drinks at the Betsy Ross Saloon; one of them, a dark-eyed Sudanese named Terry, stayed to slow-dance with her until well after last call. Vanna’s future shone brighter than ever.
Summer came. In August Vanna decided to treat herself to a long-dreamed-of camping trip: she took time off from work, filled a drab rucksack with low-tech gear, and went to Canada to test her survival skills in the Québecois Covenant Wilderness Zone. That’s right, Vanna Domingo, the tree-hugger’s nightmare, out frolicking among the loups and beavers. Frolicking alone—Terry couldn’t get vacation time, and Vanna, still very much the independent, didn’t wait. She stayed in the Zone for two weeks, living off the land, out of reach of newspapers and television. By the time she returned to civilization, all her Brainstorm coworkers were dead, and the staff of Carver-Biotex had been decimated beyond recovery.
The African Pandemic of ’04 was in many ways the ideal Information Age plague, custom-tailored to the spirit of the times. Unlike a traditional contagion, it did not appear to spread from an initial outbreak site but flared in every corner of the global village simultaneously (the notion that “it started in Idaho” was a media fiction, like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow) and ran its full course of more than a billion deaths—thirty-eight million in the U.S.—in less than five days, overwhelming even CNN’s attempts to cover the event. In its method the Pandemic was as bloodless as modern war reportage. It didn’t just kill, it cleaned house: death by meningeal fever was followed by almost unimaginably rapid decomposition of the body into dry dust and gas. Hence there were no corpses, no mass burials, no protracted tableaux of mortality and suffering to be captured on videotape for posterity; just sudden absence, as if every black African on earth had stepped aboard a UFO at midnight and been whisked off the planet, lifted clean from the stream of history.
It made for strange mourning. Like a dream already half forgotten on waking, the disaster did not seem entirely real to the survivors, especially those whose only black acquaintances were the comedians, musicians, and sports heroes they applauded on TV. Returning from the Wilderness, Vanna’s first clue that something was amiss came at a BP station outside of Jonquière, where she spied an off-duty mechanic weeping over a French-dubbed cable broadcast of In the Heat of the Night. “What’s wrong?” Vanna asked the man who pumped her gas, and he told her: “Mr. Tibbs has passed away.”
One long night of nonstop driving later she walked alone through Brainstorm’s empty office loft. There were no signs of catastrophe, no broken glass or flashburnt plaster, not even an overturned chair. A fax machine continued to hum in its alcove; on a desk by a window, Terry’s mug awaited a refill. Everything was in order, except that nobody was home. If Vanna had bothered to check the fire stairs, she would have found four empty sets of clothes, including shoes, spread out over the landing, but she didn’t poke around that much. She didn’t want to poke around that much. Instead she sat at the think-team conference table and waited for everyone to come back; she was still waiting when darkness fell.
The National Guard made a sweep through Harlem the next day, shutting off gas and power in the deserted buildings. They found the jeep Vanna had driven to Canada abandoned on a side street, and had it towed, along with all the other abandoned vehicles; they broke in the front door at Brainstorm, and unplugged the fax machine. Vanna Domingo had vanished by then, vanished like the others, though unlike the others she would eventually return, rescued from Manhattan’s netherworld by a man whose innocence of loss and pain seemed to render him immune to misfortune. But the woman Harry Gant met in Grand Central Station in 2017 was not the same woman who had gone missing in Harlem in 2004.
Vanna Domingo no longer believed in the future. The devil’s own luck, she now understood, could not guarantee the day after tomorrow. Gant had given her back her life, a life anyway, and she drew strength from the immense confidence he had in himself and his works, yet she would never trust that confidence completely. Even Harry was mortal, and his naiveté frightened her. He just didn’t see how fragile reality was.
But one hand washes the other. If Harry Gant didn’t know enough to protect himself from a threat, Vanna would do it for him. The fact that Philo Dufresne was a black man did not enter into her consideration at all; the only black people she knew had gone away long ago and had not returned. Dufresne was simply a threat to be dealt with. By whatever means necessary, Vanna thought. Torpedoes and depth charges; fire and a sword. And Harry Gant need never be the wiser.
2023: Mutate or Die
Captain Chance Baker, late of the icebreaker South Furrow, got to the Scurvy Puffin Bar at half past six. Vanna Domingo was nowhere in sight, so he eased his way through the crowd of sailors on leave and got a navy grog to ease his stomach. He’d been serious in making his threat to Dufresne and was still determined to carry it through, but the illicit nature of what he was getting himself into made him queasy. Baker believed in the law, not just the spirit but the letter of it, and did not like breaking it for any reason. On the other hand, he’d be damned if he’d let anyone blow a ship out from under him without a payback.
At the center of the bar, a nude holographic man and woman coupled inside a column of green light. Baker, abashed by the display, chose a table away from the projection stage and focused on his grog until Vanna Domingo arrived. “Captain Baker,” she greeted him, gesturing to a towheaded man who accompanied her, “this is Corporal Penzias. He’ll be working with you, handling fire control on the ship.”
The corporal offered a hand. “First name’s Troubadour,” he said.
Captain Baker hesitated a fraction too long before responding. “Corporal?” he asked, hoping to cover the rudeness. “Not navy, then?”
“Marine infantry. Combat-casualty discharge.”
“A foot soldier trained for ASW?”
“Jack of all weapons systems, Captain. Anti-submarine, anti-tank, antiair, you name it. I can move anything that shoots. Just don’t ask me to wink at the target.”
Penzias had no eyes.
Captain Baker had never encountered a more repulsive prosthetic replacement. The device was called a VISION Rig, or Vivid Image System Implanted Optic Neurostimulator; a long name for what looked like a pair of opera glasses jammed into Penzias’s empty eye sockets, anchored in place by a skeletal bracework of stainless steel. The opera glass lenses were bulbous, probably to provide limited peripheral vision, though they also gave Penzias the profile of an insect. There was surprisingly little scar tissue, however; he’d kept his eyebrows, which meant he hadn’t been blinded by a mine or a flame weapon. Baker decided not to ask for specifics.
“Let’s make this quick,” said Vanna, as she and Penzias took seats. “The ship is already moored at a dock in New Jersey. You’ll meet the rest of the crew early tomorrow morning and proceed there directly.”
“That is quick,” Baker observed. “The son of a bitch only sank me yesterday.”
“I’ve been planning this for a lot longer,” Vanna told him. “Yesterday’s attack is only the last straw. But I want the retaliation to be immediate, before Dufresne and his people have a chance to do any more damage to Gant Industries. I need you at your station by noon Thursday.”
“That’s less than forty-eight hours from now.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Depends on the condition of the ship and where ‘at my station’ is. What type of vessel are we talking about?”
“One moment.” Vanna opened her purse. Troubadour Penzias sucked noisily at a plastic squeeze bottle, causing Captain Baker, once again, to stare.
“Red dye no. 32,” Penzias explained. Baker had assumed the splotches on the man’s lips were bruises of some kind, but now he realized that Penzias’s teeth and gums—the entire inside of his mouth, in fact—we
re stained crimson. “I drink twelve fluid ounces each day.”
“Of food coloring?”
“Low-level carcinogen. I’m building up a tolerance.”
“To what?”
“To cancer.”
Baker kept a poker face. “Is that so?”
“It’s necessary,” said Penzias. “It’s no use anymore to hope you won’t get it. Too much poison in the air and water, and no matter where you hide it’ll find you. So the only answer is to build up a tolerance. Mutate or die.”
“Here it is.” Vanna slid a sealed pouch across the table to Captain Baker. “Everything you need is in there: deck plan, ship’s vital statistics, navigational charts, and the coordinates where you’ll wait for Dufresne. Don’t lose it.”
“He’s going to come to us?”
“You’ll be carrying a special cargo. An expensive cargo, but one he won’t be able to resist. You just be very sure, Captain Baker, that Dufresne doesn’t catch you off guard.”
Penzias cleared his throat; the lenses of the VISION Rig whirred and refocused. “Don’t forget my perk,” he told Vanna. “You haven’t said anything about my perk.”
“Your perk.” Vanna regarded him as if he really were a bug of some kind. “Do you know how much this exterminator’s mission is already costing? And you want to add the price of a useless indulgence on top of that.”
“Not useless,” Penzias insisted. “Not an indulgence. It isn’t as if you’re offering a huge bounty for Dufresne’s head. My perk is my price.”
“After,” Vanna told him. “After you’ve sunk Dufresne, we’ll discuss—”
“No. Tomorrow morning. I want it for the hunt.”
“That’s ridiculous! You have more than enough weapons on the ship already. And Dufresne will be under the water, so you won’t need—”
“You don’t need antibodies until the sickness strikes,” Penzias countered. “You don’t need a tolerance until you do need it. I want my perk.”