Tyrannia

by Alan Deniro

  “I don’t have to tell you,” she says. “It’s not important.”

  Holland sighs. “This is getting really old.” Then he tells his proxy to hit her jaw with the back of his gun. After the proxy does that, Holland asks her again about her goings-on in France. She remains silent.

  “Do you support the global Intifada?” I say.

  “Who doesn’t?” she says, straining against her chains to try to touch her bruised jaw. She’s not attractive. Her brows are too bushy and her arms are too thin.

  “I’m not going to answer that. Are you Muslim?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m French Canadian.”

  “Well that explains something,” I say, more for Holland’s benefit. But he isn’t buying it. My proxy is struggling to pay attention. He looks tired. The warden comes in. Amanda is still defiant. She starts saying her name over and over again. The warden is a middle-

  aged woman with a tray of iced tea in plastic liter bottles.

  “Everything going okay?” she says. She’s the middle-manager type that one finds so frequently on the crumbling edges of Western civilization.

  “Everything’s fine,” Holland says.

  “That’s great,” she says. She smiles at us and sets the bottles down for all those actually present. The proxies relax and take the iced tea and drink up. After a few seconds, Amanda does too. Then she presses the bottle against her cheek, leaning her head forward, on account of the chains. The warden lets us know that if we need anything, we should contact her, she’ll be in the garden. Then she leaves through a side door.

  “So you didn’t know those kids?” I say.

  “I’m kind of glad they stole it,” she says, coughing all of the sudden. “I mean, not that they died, but that . . . I represent . . . the enemy to them. Because I can’t understand what they understand . . .”

  She drifts off. Then she tries to throw the bottle at my head, which upsets me. I thought she would have tried to bean Holland, since he is clearly the vicious, unrepentant asshole. But on second thought, she probably doesn’t make a distinction between the two of us.

  I tell my proxy to pick up the bottle, but he doesn’t hear me.

  “What?” he says. “The little guy is waiting to set sail. He’s just waiting your instructions.”

  “What?” I say.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Holland says. He swipes at his own proxy. “Pick up the fucking bottle.” But he’s ignored. Amanda starts laughing, and it’s contagious. Our proxies slump to the floor. I move to Amanda, move through the desk she’s behind, and stare at her, an inch from her face. Her pupils are dilating and her bruised jaw is like a half of a plum.

  “Did you poison that Game Boy?” I say. She reaches up and puts her hand through my face. I think she tries to cradle it, caress it?

  “I’ll talk to you again,” she says. Then her head slumps down. The proxies are quiet on the ground also.

  “Holland?” I say.

  “I’m going to find the warden and find out what’s going on,” he says.

  “Be careful,” I say, on instinct.

  “Jackson,” he says, “we’re not really here. Remember?”

  “I guess.”

  “You know, it’s strange,” he says, not really listening to me, “I feel kind of bad about Amanda. I usually have good or bad feelings about people. My feeling about her was immediately bad—but maybe I was wrong.” Holland manages a smile. “Just this one time.”

  “It takes a big man to admit mistakes,” I say, without much emphasis. At that moment I want to be rid of him. And then he’s gone, into the garden. I call Dispatch. “Our subject and proxies are down,” I say. “They took some iced tea . . .”

  “What?” she says. “Hang on . . .” There is a fly above Amanda. It lands in her hair. I lean back against the wall and for a few seconds I don’t know where I am. I’m a trainee in the Academy. I’m a small boy running on a beach crowded with unlicensed beauticians and mechanics and driftglass. I’m burying my mother and taking my sister to school in our neighborhood shelter. I wonder whether my detection skills have held me in good stead.

  “Jackson, you need to get out of there. You need to disengage.”

  “What? Listen . . . I’m going to check on Holland.” Our projections have a range of about fifty meters.

  “Jackson, no, listen to me—”

  Then the connection jams. I open the door to the garden. It’s enclosed with high white walls, and it’s night out. I didn’t expect night. There’s a full moon and a cold wind. I imagine that it’s cold. The garden is green grass about ankle high, wasted myrtles with blue flowers ringing the trunks, a swimming pool in the center. There are denser woods farther back. I can’t see the end and I don’t see Holland anywhere. I edge toward the pool. When I get closer, I see red mudpuppies skittering in the water. And beneath them, the body of the warden, face down on the bottom, weighed down with a brown belt. Her skin is greenish.

  “Holland?” I call out. Maybe he’s already disconnected. I’m out of my element. I hear a whistle and look up. The warden is there on the flat roof of the interrogation center. Or rather the false warden. She waves. She’s placing what look like round, gray stones on the roof.

  “Backup!” I yell. But there’s no one to hear me. A gaunt little man, about two feet high, peeks over the edge of the roof and jumps off. He’s naked. He starts running toward me, wielding a knife that’s as long as his body. He bounds through the air in long leaps. I start running. I mean to find Holland. Never leave a partner behind. I learned that in the Academy. I edge around the pool and launch past trees and into the woods, startling geese—I have no idea what geese are doing in the woods—who push away with alabaster wings. The little man is swearing at me. I look up at the moon, and a monstrous cloud passes over its face.

  Stumbling on a root, I feel him leaping onto my back, clinging to my neck. His body is slick with a light syrup and it’s with a surprised pleasure that I can feel this, and smell hickory charcoal, and hear the little man’s breath against my ear. That he is a ghost like me.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him.

  Then he’s gone, and there are about five medics and security agents—I can’t tell them apart—standing over me, prodding me, holding my wrists down. I see Dispatch’s face on the edge of the circle. I shout at all of them and I’m detained and sedated.

  I wake up and recover just in time for Holland’s funeral. It’s closed casket, since his real body was electrocuted and charred in Chicago beyond all recognition. I don’t actually go to the funeral, but Dispatch sets up a special hookup, parking an interrogation unit outside the gates of the cemetery. The Plot of Detectives is surrounded on all sides by crowd-control bunkers and ivy interlaced with barbed wire. Throughout the ceremony, I keep having images of the warden’s body being defiled by her impersonator. She’s just been dragged out of the pool and the impersonator assesses her body, then pulls down her soaking pants and I can’t think of anything worse, I keep thinking. Then the father who we detained in Dijon, who was blown up, starts pissing on the two of them.

  A color guard shoots off a salute with shoulder rockets. Bible verses are read, projections of doves released. Holland’s family from Nova Carolina thought of that. Holland was never very religious. I’ve never considered before whether I actually like Holland until he’s lowered to the ground. It wasn’t that type of relationship. We’d worked well together on the beat. Few suspects liked us. Pretty much everyone we talked to was a suspect. Detained subjects become biologically alive but legally dead. The transformation is pretty simple, as easy as pointing a gun in someone’s face.

  Now I have to understand, by myself, what is in front of me. I’m off the case. I’m given leave. I don’t want to leave. I return to my office environment and Dispatch is waiting for me.

  �
��Do you want to get a coffee?” she says.

  “Okay,” I say. “Sure.”

  We walk through the quiet linoleum tunnels. “So the safehouse in Romania was destroyed,” she says. “Firebombed. You’re very lucky, Jackson.”

  “How . . . did Holland die?”

  “The enemy’s found a way to interact with detectives. So the whole program’s being put on hold. Until my superiors can find countermeasures.”

  “Countermeasures.” I don’t know what that means for me, whether I’ll have to be retrained or not.

  “That’s right. But it’s not anything you’ll have to worry about,” she says.

  “So how . . . how did I live then?” I ask.

  “I overrode the blocking field and disconnected you. It was close.” We pass functionaries in thirdhand suits, functionaries in innocence masks, functionaries pushing handcarts full of black boxes and freeze-packed hands. Occasional skylights reveal the sun, far overhead.

  “What about the case? The Game Boy? The assassin.”

  She stops and puts a hand on my shoulder. “All those things don’t matter anymore. They were probably, I don’t know, going to use the Game Boy to assassinate someone? That seems likely, doesn’t it? Or maybe someone pawned off the Game Boy on Amanda without knowing any of this.” We reach the Starbucks set in a common area atrium. I order tea for both of us. At the table, she plunges into her life story. She tells it with urgency, as if she might never see me again. She grew up in Pensacola . . . her parents were from Nicaragua . . . 2nd team all-state in field hockey, but there weren’t a lot of field hockey teams in Florida, so it wasn’t as big of a deal as it sounded . . . lost everything . . . developed throat cancer after a dirty bomb but beat the odds . . . runs a podcast on world music in her spare time . . . a few other memory-based knick-knacks . . . For the longest time, she has been just a voice to me. When she finishes, I take her hand, even though this is against policy.

  “We’re going to be fine,” I say. “Aren’t we?”

  She sips her tea. I watch her hands.

  “Your partner, Holland,” she says. “You know, he was never very nice to me. Does it make me bad to think that? To dwell on his flaws? What do his flaws mean to me, anymore?”

  I tell her that Holland’s flaws still live with me, that his carelessness got him killed. I don’t tell her about the thoughts I have when my eyes are open.

  “I’m going to recommend you as a consultant to my superiors, while you recover. Listen, Jackson, when the time comes I want you to tell them everything. Spare nothing. Because they’ll want to know everything. They’ll be asking you a lot of questions.”

  “What kinds of questions?” I ask.

  She wraps the tea bag string around her finger and squeezes out ochre drops.

  “We don’t know yet,” she says. “We don’t know where yet. A safe place, of course, where you can consult . . . for a while. Consider it a lateral career move.”

  “So you’re telling me to pack for a long trip?” I ask.

  She puts a hand on my shoulder. I almost expect it to pass through. “Take care, Jackson. I have to go to headquarters. It’s a long trip to Nome.”

  As she stands up, I stand up too. “What about the garden? Was it destroyed too?”

  She shakes her head, as if I’ve confirmed a theory she’s had about me, that her internal inquiry has come to a successful resolution. “Garden? There was no garden there. We don’t have a budget for gardens. It’s a wasteland there, remember?”

  I take my tea and smile at her. I have indeed realized my foolishness. “I remember,” I say. I take a sip. Then she’s gone. A man with no arms cleans my table. His Starbucks apron is streaked with red juices. The rag is in his mouth as he bends down and wipes down. He has an array of lapel pins, indicating campaigns, on his apron: TAJIKISTAN, BHUTAN, HORN OF AFRICA NIGHT RESCUE. I put a Liberty Gold chit in his side pocket and he nods and smiles. I wonder if my efforts have served to protect him.

  And I don’t forget his face as I walk back to my quarters. It’s easy enough to log in again—Dispatch had left the last location in the system, and I’ve observed enough over the last few years to find my place. I arrive where I last was. The detainment center is rubble and empty. The moon is monotone. Shadows cast a black and white world. A sprinkler jettisons water droplets on the lawn. I take off my shoes and socks. I peer at the sprinkler as I pass it. It’s not water coming out; it’s a coppery liquid. I bend down to the grass and run my hand across it, then lick my palm. Acrid and smoky. I get on my hands and knees and lap up the water.

  “I’m here with you,” Amanda says. She puts a hand on my neck and strokes it. “I’ll make sure you won’t take too much. Just a controlled dose.”

  “Right, but it killed you,” I say between sips. The water is pesky and it’s hard to get a lot of it into my mouth. But I get enough.

  “We’re not in that world anymore.”

  “Which world is this, then?” I feel both lucky and guilty that I get to ask some follow-up questions.

  “The one that I was trying to pretend I didn’t know existed. The one that I was killed for, because I knew about it.”

  I stumble to my feet toward the swimming pool. I’ve always tried to operate within the strictures of the laws given to me, which I admit have cast a pretty wide net.

  Doing otherwise was never part of my employment profile.

  On the other hand, I’m unemployed now.

  The warden’s body isn’t in the swimming pool anymore. But there’s a long knife floating on the surface, like a leaf. I bend down and pluck it out. My hand takes to it. There is a straight-and-narrow trough, about a hand’s width, that I haven’t noticed before. Azure tiles run along its sides. There are three other troughs, and they all divide the backyard into quadrants. Mudpuppies of rust stare at me as I walk past. Their eyes are white.

  The sprinkler stops. It’s done its share to wet the grass. I want to cry about how peaceful the night is. I’m walking on the grass blades toward the woods. My strides grow longer. There really isn’t any way to explain this. I put the knife between my teeth and sail forward through the air. One of the little men meets me in mid-flight and tries to get a handhold on my body. I move my body sideways, as if I have no depth at all.

  “The jinn come from the mudpuppies!” Amanda calls out from below me, cupping her hands. The bruises on her face are gone. Then she says something in French. Her homeland is gone. “I mean, the mudpuppies are incubators for the jinn. The people who made this world try to control them. But . . . they have minds of their own.”

  “Got it,” I call down to her. The jinn lands, and leaps back toward me. “I should have taken your condition more seriously,” I say to her as I land and pivot.

  “Ah, well . . .” she says. Then she jumps up toward me and embraces my body. I worry that she’s going to drag me down, but she doesn’t. “I wasn’t honest,” she says. “Those kids died because of me. I knew someone was going to try to steal the Game Boy, so I poisoned the start button. Then I just . . . panicked, and gave it away to these two kids who were milling about.”

  “Why . . . why was it so important to begin with?”

  “It’s not the Game Boy itself. It’s the game cartridge that was in it. The Saudis had a covert program, where they wanted to upload suicide bombers to a virtual paradise. They were to present this as a ‘gift’ to Hamas—but when Hezbollah and Hamas started attacking each other . . .” I feel her shoulders twitch. Time can slow for any reason. “The Saudis abandoned it. Anyway, it’s the same technology that lets you become a ghost. Except, with this game . . . it has a neural link, see? And people equipped with the right link themselves can access this place at any time. This game was the prototype for mass production. But then I stole it. And things got out of control.”

  “You weren
’t in a great spot to begin with,” I say. I see, behind me, the jinn spring through the air. He has a black blade hoisted in both of his hands above his head. “Who was trying to kill you, Amanda?”

  Amanda closes her eyes. “God is behind everything,” she says, letting go of me and settling back to earth, “and yet has no capability to alter our circumstances. Having that capability—to be inside of us through even the smallest manifestation—would destroy everything we hold dear.” She wipes her nose with her sleeve. “At least that’s what I’ve heard.”

  “I really couldn’t say,” I say, as I jump upward, arcing the knife in front of me. The knives clang and mine rattles down, slicing the shoulder of the jinn. He screams and plummets.

  “But things didn’t go as they planned, exactly. I mean, I’m dead, but I’m here. And the jinn keep hatching. No one really controls it anymore. People are trying to control it, but . . . It’s not really God’s fault that I’m dead,” Amanda says. “Whose fucking fault is that?”

  “I don’t know, our Coalition of Interested Forces? Me?”

  “Well, you know, your government resuscitated the garden. It was a cultural exchange program with the Saudis when they started training Christian suicide bombers alongside the Sunni ones. I swear, Jackson, one day this is all going to be washed away.”

  “Like my guilt?” I say. Because I’m beginning to feel guilty.

  “Well,” she says, “let’s not get carried away.”

  Knowing that, I want to comfort the jinn, but he is gone, and his blood trail is lost in the slick grass. I slide to the ground and take toward the woods, following the water trough. I don’t look back to Amanda for anything. I still don’t know who she works for—or worked for—and what she intends to do, now that she is stuck in the garden that she wanted to destroy. The trees in the woods are slender, spaced in measured proportion, and the grass thins. Feathery conifers. There is an angular trail.