by Alan Deniro
(Regarding the spring, yes. Yes, it has had a troublesome history. According to the legend depicted in the camp brochure, fifty Indians were massacred there. With their own hatchets. By American forces. The Indians were supposedly going to poison the water, and were duly surrounded and taken care of, making the entire three-county area safe for habitation. What really happened—besides the massacre itself, of course—was anyone’s guess. Motives are hard to discover unless a person is within sight, and under close observation. I’m standing right in front of you, so we’re covered.)
I scrambled down the Hatchet Trail, into the gully—it might have been a gulch—at the base of which the spring resided. I could hear it gurgling during my descent. I can hear it gurgle now. Some day you might be able to. In moonlight I saw my face. I held up my four-fingered hand to the reflection. Suddenly my face didn’t seem so interesting. Seeing an opportunity, I unrolled the little ice pack that I brought with me, which I had nurtured over the previous two weeks, and threw the remainders of my pinky into the spring. I wasn’t sure if I was consecrating the finger or the spring. I kept what I could after the accident and that’s a good rule of thumb. Just in general.
No phantasms chastised me or beat me up near the spring. No Indian ghosts were released from the water. I washed my clothes, but then, indeed, a quorum of camp counselors entered my sight line. I saw their peppy flashlights first, then their authoritarian rescue blazers. My bunkmate had had a nightmare about me, apparently. That was the tip off. When people have visions about you, and choose to act on them—tactically, I mean—you need to understand where they’re coming from. In that they have no idea where they’re coming from.
I waded into the water, which came up to my waist and was glacial. I raised my hands up and told them that I meant no harm, please don’t kill me. I wasn’t trying to poison the water.
I don’t remember what they said back to me. I learned how to be less daring upon my return. I arched. I crafted dioramas out of bark and acorns and insect shells and broken lightbulbs and the discarded fingernails of my peers. I purchased souvenirs of my time at camp—false arrowheads, a tableau of the sunlight breaking through the forest canopy and shining upon the spring—and sent them back to my father with platitudes and euphemisms, which were codes for the untold anguish he had caused me. You wouldn’t understand the souvenirs; they were from a bygone era.
Well, the conductor is flagging us. All right. I wish a company would manufacture a jacket that would protect you from wolves. The wolf packs have made a comeback. Not in our state, but you never know. Be sure to read the pamphlet I put in your backpack. You might acquire “tips” during your stay. You’ll have plenty of time to practice tips while you wonder: why am I here? It’s a legitimate question. I don’t hate you, really, for thinking it.
Cudgel Springs was quaint. But once the spring dried up, it no longer seemed appropriate to stick to tradition for the sake of it. So the camp changed, in that it was abandoned. No kayaks, no crafts, no songs, no counselors. Just woods and buildings that age like we do. The trees are still tall and quiet. They tower over the Hatchet Trail, as well as the crater at the end of the trail. It’s off-limits. A few years ago, foolish children from the nearby town—doubtless the descendants of the original settlers—went exploring in the woods near the crater and never came back. I saw it covered locally. Don’t go there. The food’s all frozen and in your pack. It should last you about a week, but after that you may have to forage. Do not worry about me. I want you to stop thinking of me. I’m sure that once you are there, others will come. Peers and counselors. You are my preemptive strike, my pioneer. If they do come, all of the other campers will come from better families than ours.
But they won’t know what to expect.
So be keen, already. Don’t write back if you’re not going to be honest.
Wait, come back.
(*_*?) ~~~~ (-_-) : The Warp and the Woof
Roger found the notebook in his attic, tucked in the side pocket of a Kevlar jacket. The notebook contained his first novel, the one he wrote when he was twenty-two and never had the heart to revise, or learn any more about. He had forgotten about it, but the smell of his old cologne on the pages awakened his memory. The world that he had written about was long dead, but he wanted someone else to sift through the notebook, to extract something marketable from it. Roger couldn’t read his own handwriting anymore. He stared and stared at it—the squiggles—but did anyone know cursive anymore? No one had penmanship. For a few delusional seconds he wondered whether someone else had written it.
He went downstairs. Having no luck figuring out what to do with the notebook, and too afraid to place it with his current material, next to his laptop (which still needed to be hand-cranked for the night), he called his agent, voice only.
“I’m going to ship the notebook to you, I mean manually.” Above Roger was a framed picture of Roger with the president. Roger’s hair was darker then—no, not the radiation, that had no effect on the color.
“What time is it?” his agent said.
“It’s noon,” Roger said. “What are you doing? Why are you still sleeping?”
The agent said nothing. The agent knew Roger didn’t want to hear about Lord Manhattan, the sweeps and declarations. The agent would have moved out of Queens if she could but she didn’t have the right IDs. The agent had to conduct meetings at night, and daytime security was expensive.
“Well,” Roger said, after the pause, “okay, could you look at it, then? Maybe there’s something there that could be extracted from it?”
“Sure, sure,” the agent said, turning over, squinting at the blinds.
It took five business days for the notebook to reach the agent. FedEx lost a few planes in a flurry of SAMs the week before. Flight schedules were blown up and reconstructed. The courier who handed the package to the agent came at 3 a.m.
“Hang on, let me find my wand,” the agent said, fumbling in her pockets. “Shit, do you have yours?”
The courier shook her head. “Sorry, mine got stolen.”
“Just give me the package then. I can scan it later.”
The courier shook her head, and eyed the corridor of the agent’s building, the cameras like rifle scopes in the crown molding. “You know the rules. I could get in trouble from the Lord’s Army, like that.”
“Bitch, give me the package!” The agent spat. The courier took a step back and cradled the package to her chest.
“Okay, okay,” the agent sighed. “I think I might have a spare wand in my kitchen. Hang on.” Storming back into her apartment and slamming the door behind her, she thought about her options. She hadn’t been able to find her wand for week. Roger, as much as she found him a saddening figure, was her primary source of income. And he hadn’t had a new book in a year. The side projects, yes—but the ghost writers and translators made their cuts larger and larger, the custom freight to Roger’s market strongholds—White Vegas, Nebraskan Rhodesia, the Dobsonpods on the Yellow Sea, Pentecosta—were getting more restrictive. And they were strongholds, not strangleholds. Newer, semiliterate thriller authors were rising. Thugs, Roger called them, even some reeducated Asians and Arabs, but they gave people what they wanted. Words garnished with blood. Roger was about ideas, his ideas about the state. With each passing year after Operation Mexico Moon, the agent cared about those ideas less and less. The agent had to eat and pay for the apartment, not to mention the retainer fee for the building’s security detail. She thought about what she had to do, walking to her bedroom, and what she had to do made her sad.
She would not tell Roger.
She came back and opened the door, rather amazed that the courier was still standing there. The agent raised her arm and tasered the courier’s face. Wasn’t a clean shot; the stinger punctured her cheek, straight through. The courier fell back and the agent kicked the package thr
ough her apartment door, rubbing the arm brace where her taser was attached. She then unhooked the wire, which would dissolve in about an hour. Kneeling down to the courier she said, “I warned you. It’s my risk. It’s my package. Why should you give a fuck if I get blown up by it? I have no family left to sue you. And you can fuck your Lord, you fucking hear me?” She stood up and rolled the courier into the freight elevator, and pressed Down.
She decided she needed wine before opening the package. After a half a bottle, Quebecois Concord vintage, she cut open the package with a butcher knife. Black duct tape all along the perimeter, thicker than the packaging itself. Then she extracted the notebook. Thick gray cover, gray wire spirals. The pages were soft, cheap paper, almost decomposing, unlined. Roger’s cursive alternated between blue ink and pencil. The agent couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
“Fuck,” she said to herself, taking the wine from the bottle. “Was he thirteen when he wrote this?” Then she slept, dreaming of elephants in rivers electrocuted by lightning. They were trying to cross to tell the agent something, but she kept saying, turn back, turn back! When she woke, she took the tube out of her ear and shook it.
“Ah,” she said, then stared at the notebook. Then Roger called.
“Well?” he said.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Roger,” she said. “It’s really . . . dense.” She rubbed her arm where she had attached the taser. “I’m going to have to bring in a consultant.”
“Who?” On the other end, she heard his apprentice scrubbing a floor and running a hose. Roger had good grandchildren, who went to good schools. He boarded writers-in-residence each year from his pool of readerly constituents. This year it was only one writer. He would not trust his apprentice with his notebook; she did his chores. The other Minnesotans in his complex, which used to be the Minnesota Zoo, tolerated him because he was famous.
“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 was a long time since Roger 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 twenty-five 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 he 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 fishbones 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 into 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 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 part 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 she could only hear their voices, and 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 cauterize 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.”
&n
bsp; 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 cathedral . . .
“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 saltwater on its face, large as a saucer.
“I saw an eel,” his son said, as he got closer, panting heavily. “But I escaped it.”