by Jesse Karp
"How about a girlfriend?" It was all he had left. "A blond girl, real pretty." Sharon was shaking her head.
Mal's eyes wandered around, and finally he nodded and stood up.
"Okay," he said, instead of offering anything reassuring or hopeful. What did he owe her, exactly?
"So, what, are you going to go back to his place?"
"I guess I am. Maybe he'll show up."
She led him to the door but stopped in front of it and held her place.
"I think we should call the police," she said.
What he thought about the police, generally, was that you shouldn't call them. But Tommy was actually gone. Not missing like he went for an unexpected walk, but missing like he had called for help and there were people after him. At least that would explain why Tommy was blocking locator apps when he made his call to Mal.
"Okay."
She looked up at him, letting her guard down just long enough to show him she was frightened, then shut it away again. What did she do about her fear these days? Did she still go on week-long benders, or had George cured her of that? And why should Mal care, really?
He blew off school for the rest of the day. Would anyone realize he wasn't there? He wasn't good enough or bad enough for teachers to care one way or the other. There were people who knew him, of course, but no one who particularly sought him out, unless it was for a fight, because he had a certain reputation in some circles. He didn't make a habit of ditching, but he did it when he needed to. Sometimes they called his foster parents, sometimes they didn't. What would the Fosters say if they did? He had no idea. They were nothing but a pair of faces to him at this point.
He sat in Tommy's apartment again. The place was nothing new in the daylight, though the hall outside was noisier. Music played too loud through one of the doors, and two different sets of people yelled at each other in two different languages from behind two other doors. Smells of spicy food filled the hall and seeped into Tommy's place.
He poked around, embarrassed when he found some condoms and surprised when he came upon a sketchpad filled with rough pencil drawings of things and people. The sketches made something funny happen in Mal's chest. At first they made him feel as if he were seeing something about who Tommy was, but as he flipped through them he started to feel as though he was searching through a stranger's life. He left the rest of the apartment alone and just waited. Pacing, he kept finding himself in front of the picture of Tommy and the girl at the beach. Important enough for Tommy to take a hard image off his cell and put on display. Was Tommy the sentimental sort, or had the girl in the picture made this choice? Was she the reason Tommy had stayed out of George's house without crawling back, had managed to keep an apartment of his own for months? Mal looked at the photo intermittently for minutes until he finally convinced himself he might need it to show their faces around. He removed it from its frame and slipped it into his back pocket.
He played the last half hour of a movie about an alligator terrorizing a city, beaming it from his cell onto a cracking wall, and was into the last rounds of the week's Blood Match X-Treme finals when he started to wonder if he was going to be here forever. When he'd decided to wait, he figured it could be for as much as two or three days, but now, just two or three hours started to seem interminable. He abandoned the ball game and went to the window. Outside, the world looked gray. He felt as if he remembered a time, as a child, when there was a sun and people looked up at it instead of down, embroiled in a conversation on cell, or into the palms of their hands, surfing as they walked, their minds on anything but the gray world around them.
And there was a knock at the door.
He limped hard to the door, adjusting to the stiffness that had set into his injured body as he'd been sitting there. He hesitated, remembered looking through the peephole last night and seeing those four faces staring weirdly back, right at him. Cautiously, he checked the peephole again and saw a young face framed by blond hair. It had five thin silver rings in the left ear and a tiny silver stud in the left nostril. It looked worried, and sweeter because of it.
The door had no functioning lock left. Mal wouldn't have been able to get in if it had. It was pure luck—or something harder to explain—that the place hadn't been cleaned out last night after he'd gone. He pulled the door open, and the girl looked happy, then surprised when she ended up looking into a chest instead of the face she was expecting to see. She followed the chest up and seemed to relax once she got to the head.
"Um, hi," he said, guilty about getting caught in a place he didn't quite belong. "I'm Tommy's brother."
"I know." She smiled. "Mal; you're kind of ... uh... big, for a little brother. It's hard to tell in the pictures."
"You've seen my picture?"
"Sure. Tommy has pictures of you in his cell."
That was shocking enough to keep Mal staring dumbly for too long.
"I'm Annie," she said, trying both to be polite and to look behind him into the apartment at the same time. "Is Tommy back?"
"He's not, actually. Why don't you come in?" He let her pass, closed the door, and followed her back to the couch. With her here, he felt like he was the guest now. She sat down and, obviously sensing the same shift, gestured for him to take a seat.
"So, do you know where Tommy is?" she asked.
"I don't. Do you?"
She shook her head, looked down somewhat darkly.
"No idea?"
She shook her head again without pause. She'd obviously been over this on her own.
"When was the last time you saw him?"
"Yesterday afternoon," she said. "I haven't seen or heard from him since."
That wasn't such a long time, Mal thought, but she was talking about it like he had been marching off to meet his doom.
"Where was he headed?" he pressed a little. He felt foolish doing it. He wasn't a cop or a truancy officer; he wasn't even Tommy's brother in any way that really counted. But what was left to do? He had taken up a mission of some kind, and he'd come back here for these answers.
"Tommy had a little..." She searched for a word that would get the urgency across but not betray Tommy. "A little trouble, I guess you could say, with some people."
"Yeah, I met them."
"You did?" She looked up, her eyes showing doubt and hope, fused together.
"Sort of. Weird bunch."
She shook her head, not understanding.
"They were street, but they were kind of missing the attitude."
"Street kids? No." She shook her head. "I never saw him, but Tommy said the guy he met always wore a suit. Tommy said he was ... what? Like, kind of cold. Quiet, but you knew he didn't think much of you. That's what Tommy said, like he was just a tool to this guy."
"So he was never into trouble with any street kids?"
"No." She didn't waver for a second. Tommy was her open book.
"So what about this guy? What did Tommy do for him?"
Her eyes wandered away, fell on the sketchbook that Mal had put back in its place on a windowsill.
"Look, Annie, I'm not trying to find Tommy to make trouble for him. I think I'm probably enough trouble for him when I'm not around. He called me last night and said he wanted to see me, and he sounded a little scared. I wasn't there when he called, and when I finally got here, he was gone. I just want to find him and help him if I can. That's all I want."
"Then we both want the same thing." Annie was almost crying. He could see the tension in her face and neck as she tried to hold it back. She took a moment or two before she went on. "I don't know exactly what he did. Carried things sometimes, I think. He was well paid for it. I'm just not sure."
Good pay for carrying something around meant only one thing to Mal. He knew kids who'd taken that kind of work. Most of them lived high on the cash for a little, then the consequences came crashing down on them. Which, unfortunately, sounded like Tommy to a T.
"Do you know where he does business, this guy in the suit?"
&
nbsp; "I know where Tommy used to meet him."
"Show me." He stood up and offered his hand to her, which she promptly and gratefully accepted.
Rain came down from the gray sky in cold needles. Cars had their headlights on and steam rose from the streets, and it made it look like nighttime even though it wasn't. They descended into shadow, pushed through the scanners, got on a subway, and went downtown.
The attack on Con Edison some years back, a day that the national voice had christened Big Black, had ostensibly been the work of that ubiquitous scapegoat of unforeseen disaster: the terrorist attack. A few said that this was merely a story given by authority in an attempt to mask the real, though more mundane, cause: negligence. Other, more cynical voices said it was the corporations, seeing that they could sink their profit margins into the necessary rebuilding. Whatever the case, Mal remembered hearing the explosion from across the river. He remembered the darkness the city had been plunged into for nearly two weeks afterward; riots, looting, murders, residents too terrified to step outside and buy candles to light their pitch-black homes. Mal even remembered what the faces of people looked like before that fear had set in permanently, before so many who lived or worked in the city realized they had lost someone—a neighbor, an employee, a sister—in the incineration of the four blocks surrounding the power plant. Faces that used to look up, determined, now looked down, into cell screens or at their own feet. Anywhere, anywhere but ahead, anything but facing what else might be coming toward them. Not just the people, but the city itself. In the wake of Big Black, the city, already under the strain of the nationwide financial collapse, had allowed several public services to be taken over by private concerns.
And so, the subways. Scanners, installed at every access point, inspected your metal when you pushed through the turnstiles. Some people said that they scanned the MetroPass feed on your cell, too, and told the corporations what stations you were leaving, where you frequented and spent your time and money. The trains themselves: instead of repairing or maintaining the cars, the private concerns had left the structures to languish, acquiring tears and blemishes of rust, seats cracking apart, the walls collecting a miasma of graffiti. Rather, the corporations removed every window and installed in their places HDs in every car, locked behind high-impact plastic that cost more than the entire train itself. Now people gazed emptily at flickering ads for businesses passing by high above, the same ads scrolling down the sides of their cell displays, so they could key in and learn more. If you did not want to fix a thing, then what you had to do was make people ignore it.
What the city did contribute to its subways, all its public transportation now, was the watchful eye and the drab gray uniformed figures of the MCT. The Metropolitan Counterterrorism Task Force posted two officers at every station, the scanning lenses of their security goggles burning into everyone passing by, falling on surprised individuals and finding on them the offending set of keys or leg brace or new model of cell. This was the environment that travelers faced every morning, every evening, every ride in between.
"Did you get that when you met the kids you thought were after Tommy?" Annie asked Mal, her back to the HD and her empathetic eyes locked on him.
"What's that?"
"Your eye." She gestured and grimaced a little.
"No. That's, well, that's from a weak defense on the right."
She nodded as if she understood, or more importantly as if she didn't have to understand for it to be all right.
An MCT officer walked through the car, swinging the reflective circles of his goggles back and forth like a searchlight. Mal and Annie both instinctively looked down. Meeting the eyes of the gray sentries always bought you sharp and suspicious attention, sometimes worse. Better to look at an HD or down like you were working on a cell, even if you weren't. Better to appear absorbed in anything but the real world, until the officer passed. He did, inevitably, and left deeper silence in his wake.
"Have you and Tommy been together a long time?" Mal asked when the officer had moved into the next car.
"What's a long time? About four months. It feels like longer. In a good way."
Mal wanted to ask what Tommy had said about him, what picture she had seen, but it seemed desperate. He was getting a good sense of his shortcomings as a brother. He didn't need to put them on the table for everybody else to shuffle through.
"So Tommy sketches? I didn't know he ever had an interest in that stuff."
"No, the sketchbook is mine," she said, and a little piece of the picture Mal had been putting together of his brother disintegrated, leaving what felt like a larger blank than had been there before. "But," she went on, "he's interested enough when I do it. He won't sit for me." She smiled softly. "He could never stay in one place long enough for that. But for my birthday, he took me to the museum to see da Vinci's sketches. That was a good day."
"Your sketches are very good. I mean, I think they are. I'm no expert at all." His face creased a little. "The sketchbook was just lying out. I thought it was Tommy's."
"Oh, that's okay," she said, but her cheeks reddened. "I'm glad you liked them."
The subway rumbled on. He stole glances at her reflection in the window across the way, as though looking at her could tell him more about Tommy. She seemed young, though she was probably Mal's age or older, if she was about Tommy's age. Maybe it wasn't about age, maybe it was more that she just looked happy. Worried, sure, but somewhere between seeing her picture and now, Mal had decided she was a happy person. Tommy never seemed like a happy guy, exactly. And no wonder.
Maybe it made her happy to fix things, because that sounded like what she was doing to Tommy. Trying to do to Tommy. Mal reminded himself why they were here.
The subway stopped in midtown, and she rose and pointed at their stop. He got out with her and glanced at his watch as they went up the steps. He looked at it, squinted, shook it, but it had died. It made him think of the crack in his mirror. Was the entire world starting to fall apart? He shook his head and followed her out.
The buildings here were massive and shining, and even the thick gloom couldn't quite kill the sense of self importance about them. In some ways, they seemed like the only real, solid things in a world of ghosts.
"There." She pointed. Mal followed her finger.
"The one with the planters in front?"
"No, next to it. There."
"I don't..." He shook his head.
She glanced up at him queerly, then gently took his chin in her fingers and pointed his face just a little to the left.
"Right there," she said.
And there was the building, all reflection, breaching the gloom above and disappearing into the dirty white of the rain clouds. He wasn't sure how he could have missed it.
"We'd stop by here, sometimes," Annie said, "if I was with him when he needed to pick something up. I'd always wait outside, but he'd never be more than five minutes or so. I don't think he ever even had to go upstairs or anything. I think he just went into, like, the lobby or the lounge or whatever's right in there."
Funny thing. Mal didn't while away his hours in midtown, but he wasn't a stranger to it, either. He couldn't remember ever seeing this building before. True, many buildings looked alike around here, and it was so crowded with them, one seldom noted any building apart from another. But this one was so tall and composed of nothing but reflection. Even at the ground floor, the doors lacked address numbers or even a name plate. They were just two long rectangles of dark mirror, reflecting the droves of passing people hunkered down in their own worlds, and the street beyond them, and, across that street, Mal and Annie.
"What kind of trouble did Tommy say he was in with this guy?"
"He never said specifically. He never even said he was in trouble exactly. We were just talking about getting together and I knew he needed to come by here, but he said he wasn't going to. I pressed him a little, but he just kept saying it was nothing. But it was something. It's easy to tell when Tommy is ne
rvous."
Was that true? Mal wasn't even sure.
"Okay. You can take off if you want to. If you want to give me your phone number or something, I'll give you a call later on."
"No, I'll wait here for you."
"I'm probably going to be more than a few minutes. It's raining and all."
"I'll be right here. I'm not going anywhere."
He wanted to pat her on the shoulder. He would have if she were a guy. He nodded instead, then turned and looked at the building.
"Be careful." She touched his arm. "That sounds silly, but be careful anyway."
He nodded again and jogged across the street. He stood for a moment at the front doors, looking at himself looking uncertain, then pushed.
The doors whooshed open onto a massive lobby. There was a security desk before him with space for three or four people. There were cubbyholes for coffee shops and newsstands in the walls. A bank of elevators sat in two huge columns in the center of the room, with more lobby hidden beyond them. But it was all unfinished, form without façade. No guards at the desks, no stores. It was all metal and concrete, grays and more grays. Someone had made this lobby and stopped short of giving it a personality. And it was empty; massive, open, capable of containing and occupying hundreds of people at a time, but utterly barren of those people.
He stood still as the doors whooshed closed behind him, cutting off the sound of the street completely, leaving him in a cold silence. He turned around, foolishly, just to check that the street was still there. It was, sure enough. People hurried by, unmindful of what was in here, blind to the strangeness of it.
He craned his neck to see beyond the twin bank of elevators and stepped forward to move around them. His muffled footfalls practically boomed in here, open as it was. He hurried along, sliding more than walking, trying to stay flatfooted. He went around the elevators and saw more lobby on the other side. There was a lounge of sorts, a large space for small tables and chairs spread out so that people on their lunch break or visitors to the various businesses above could sit and look out on the small garden or fountain constructed at the lounge's center. Except there was no fountain or garden, there were no tables and chairs, no people on their lunch break, no visitors. There was just a space, filled to the brim with nothing.