by Nick Mamatas
Alysse finished her cake quickly, and licked a sliver of frosting from her thumb. “I know you. You’re on the news. My boyfriend has blogged about you.”
“Where did you get those counterfeit one-dollar bills? They were blue.”
“Do you want one? They cost a dollar.”
“How can one turn a profit like that?”
Alysse smiled. “Volume.” Then she said, “What was she like?”
Raymond’s insides twisted, then collapsed. “Are you a police officer?” he asked, likely thinking it sounded witty. His face was an off-white sheet, lips tight in what he guessed might look like a smile.
Alysse laughed. “I met her once, just a week or so before the shooting. She’s really changed things.”
“I really don’t want to talk about Julia,” Raymond says. He looked into his coffee cup. “I have no idea what happened, but it’s all just tragic. No, not even tragic. It’s wretched. Wretchedness is the only word I can think of.” He looked closely at Alysse, who actually closed her eyes while peering back at him, letting her sunglasses do the work.
“Where do you think she is right now?” she asked.
“New Jersey,” Raymond says. “I have an email. I didn’t bother sending it to the police. I’m sure they’ve tapped my phones, are monitoring the computer, are following me everywhere”—he stopped to raise his cup in a salute to one of the men of indeterminate ethnicity in which we ride, and we returned the gesture with a practiced chin-up nod of acknowledgment—“and I’m the victim.”
“Not too many men can say they’ve been left at gunpoint, I suppose. Wretched, that is the perfect word for it,” Alysse said. “Or for something.”
“Did you enjoy your cake?” Raymond said, the way a wall might. He was sitting on his own leg, and it was falling asleep.
“I did. Never been here before.”
“This Starbucks?”
“Any Starbucks. I don’t even drink hot liquids. I prefer to shop local, or in union shops, and buy direct trade, not so-called”—she raised her hands and twitched her fingers like quotation marks—“‘fair trade.’ But I was walking by and decided to come in. I wanted to try it out. Luckily, they had lemon bundt cake.”
“Most people hate the lemon bundt cake,” Raymond told her.
“Ever try it?”
“Er … no.”
“Well, I tried something new today,” Alysse said. “Maybe you should too.”
Raymond stirred and blushed. He took a sip of his beverage and said, “Women are a mystery to me. I admit it. You came here, to this Starbucks, to try something new and just happened to bring along obviously phony bills to try to pass. Why did you come here instead of the Starbucks across the street?”
Alysse said, “I came here for you.”
“I’m beginning to wonder if there’s something in the water. You sound very much like my wife,” Raymond said. “Except that where she was tantalizing, you tend to be somewhat tedious except when compared to the rest of Starbucks’s clientele.”
Alysse chewed on the last handful of her cake hurriedly. Raymond smiled. “It’s not nice to be made fun of, is it?” Then he made a move as if to pat Alysse on the knee, but stopped short, his hand hovering in the air. “Anyone can tear something down. There’s no heroism in that, especially in a society that is already fairly dynamic. Perhaps too dynamic. One day you have to grow up. I know there are few rites of passage these days; so many people not wanting families, no real opportunity for lifetime employment or even lifetime careers, but whatever little kooky thing you’re trying here, know that you are failing.”
“Did you want kids?” Alysse asked. “Did Julia not want kids?”
We didn’t hear the answer as we were called away. Many of us were called from our posts, in our men of indeterminate ethnicity, as we had found Julia. Her error was involving herself in the war.
7
JULIA couldn’t get into Fort Dix, or over to the Middle East or Central Asia. Wherever there is an imaginary dotted line striping the curve of the Earth, we are there. Travel to Jersey City, however, was entirely within her capabilities. It’s a smallish city, more an appendix to Manhattan than anything like an entity unto itself, or even a part of the greater Garden State. Jersey City was built without a center, on swamp and slabs of bedrock, designed to be plundered by generations of minor thugs running herd over successive waves of immigrants. As New York City overheated, the lands over the brown Hudson were filled with the little men and women who served as the teeth in the gears of the economy. On the water taxi between the Financial District and the lip of New Jersey, Julia made a friend in Drew Schnell.
He was easy to spot, Drew Schnell. He kept his nametag—DREW SCHNELL, BONY—clipped to his shirt on the ride home and ate two hot dogs at a time, one in each hand, taking a bite from the right and then one from the left. Hair didn’t quite cascade down his shoulders but rather oozed in the manner of something industrial. Julia sat down next to him, and looked at him, and smiled. She said, “Bony?” which Drew Schnell was not.
“Bank of New York,” Drew said after a careful swallow. “What do you want?”
“Sorry.”
“You’re attractive and started a conversation with me.”
“Ah,” Julia said. “You’re suspicious.”
“I’ve taken this water taxi every spring and summer Friday—a little treat for myself, you know—for three years. Not one person, man or woman, has ever spoken to me, except to say ‘Excuse me, please.’ And that was on 9/11, when the taxi was the only way back to Jersey with the towers collapsing. It was very crowded that day. So I know that you’re not striking up a conversation because you want to flirt. You’re striking up a conversation because you want something.” He glanced down. “Our knees aren’t touching.”
“What’s your job at the Bank of New York?” Julia said.
Drew smirked. “I’m the reason it takes three days for your check to clear. I collect the money, lend it out for, you know, a day or three, and then collect the tiny amount of interest accrued over the length of the float.” Julia said nothing in response, so Drew waited and then said, “It’s a volume business. We do about forty-five, sixty mil a day.”
“What’s your annual salary?”
“Thirty-five K.”
“So, you make your year’s income in the first ten minutes or so, of the first day of the year, and everything else is just gravy for the bank.”
Drew shrugged.
“Oh, please, health insurance?”
“I have nine fillings,” Drew said.
“How about a bite of that hot dog,” Julia said. Drew turned his right wrist and proffered to Julia the unbitten end of the frankfurter. Relish glistened under the sun. She took a bite. Drew shifted his hips and moved his thigh to hers.
“So, what do you want?”
“Weff,” Julia said with a mouthful of hot dog. “I fanth ymm tu gib mfnn t frq.”
Drew looked out across the bow, first to the squat buildings of Elizabeth and the growing skyline of Jersey City, then back over his shoulder toward Manhattan. Wind pushed a strand of hair into his mouth. “Fuck it. Okay.”
Julia, we know as we have observed her talking with her mouth full a number of times, said “Well, I want you to give Manhattan the finger.” Drew Schnell heard, “Well, I want you to give money to Iraq.” And so the next morning, Drew logged into his workstation at the Bank of New York and did just that. Four hundred million dollars, sent to seventeen different concerns, all located in Iraq and held by Iraqi nationals or exiles waiting in nearby Kuwait, without a moment’s concerns about security or protecting himself. Drew Schnell was lucky that a janitor of indeterminate ethnicity intercepted him on the way to the restroom and secreted him in the utility tunnels built under the Bank of New York’s headquarters. This is what he told us:
I haven’t had a girlfriend in ten years. On 9/11, nobody even called me to see if I was all right. I took the PATH every day into the city; I was on the
last train out before the planes hit and the towers fell. It was that close. And there were no days off for me either. My own bank in Jersey City was closed—they had a sign reading that they were closed “due to circumstances”—and lower Manhattan was frozen up to Canal Street, but we got shipped out to Brooklyn to deal with the tickets that were coming in, from Chase, from foreign, wherever. ‘Round the fourteenth I started getting the tickets from people who died in the towers, people I used to talk to on the phone. Doesn’t sound like much, but there it is, you know. Some days, those people were the only human beings I’d ever talk to, and that was just for business, just on the phone. We were working till 10:30 p.m. every night. Not a second of overtime pay—we’re “professionals”—you know. All the cops and firefighters were treated like heroes, and don’t get me wrong, they were, but so were we. Broker-dealer services heroes. Fifteen-hour days for two weeks to keep the economy from collapsing entirely. After that, it was back to the same ol’ grind, except for the stupid president fighting the stupid war in Iraq.
I had a lot of arguments with people online about the war in the lead-up to it, and I was right about every single thing. I knew that there were no WMDs. Anyone with a calculator and a little experience with chemistry could figure that out. I knew that we’d be stuck in a quagmire for years too. People are never happy about invasions, no matter who is riding in on the white horse. It was so obvious, but there was nothing anybody could do about it. Or so they thought! Ha!
“We?” we asked.
“You know,” Drew said, “us. Duh.”
“Us.”
“Us. America. You know.”
We didn’t.
“Where’s Julia?” we asked.
“Julia?”
“The woman with whom you shared a hot dog.”
“Beats me. I never saw her after that. I asked if we could go out for coffee some time and she laughed and waved her hand like she was introducing me to the city and said ‘I live right down there. Come by, anytime.’“
We put him in the Simulacrum for his own safety, and assigned him a lawyer of indeterminate ethnicity to keep the trial in motion indefinitely.
WE drive buses for the city now. We run the bodegas and the convenience stores. It’s our silhouette in the stained glass window of the Coptic church that was once a Freemason lodge, our slumped form under three coats in the Journal Square PATH station, and our arms pushing the floor buffer over pressed marble in the Post Office built for a city presumed to have a more glorious future than it did. When the Grove Street PATH station was struck by an improvised explosive device, some of the bodies in which we ride were dragged from the slag that remained of the train car. We barely escaped with our lives.
The fire department and security forces filled downtown Jersey City, but even better for our purposes were the news media of two states, their trucks and helicopters, swarming the scene. Julia knew to avoid the cameras, to keep out of earshot of the parabolic mics, to keep from the cordons and the watchful eyes of the police. And that’s how we found her. She was there, we were sure of it as she always appeared by the chaos of her making when she could (though the proximate perpetrators, two Jordanian nationals living in Jersey City were found over the course of the next three months) but she was on the rim of the panoptimatrix, in the blind spot.
Specifically, she was in the McDonald’s across the street from the Grove Street PATH station, attempting to order a Number 2 meal without onions. When we found here, one of us bereft of anything but eight legs and a mission, she was explaining, “This has onions, like the last.”
“Okay.”
“I would like a Number 2, with no onions,” Julia said. She gestured, with the bun in her hand, to the burger sprinkled with slivers of onion. “This has onions.”
The manager turned to his left and spoke over his shoulder. “Número dos, sin cebollas!” he shouted, and a lilting “Sí” drifted back over to the cash register. The manager lifted the burger and with an outstretched arm presented it to the woman who had said sí. She nodded toward the other burger, still on the counter by the squat McDonald’s cash register. Julia lifted the bun and saw that that burger was free of onions.
“I need them both to have no onions,” Julia said. Then we found the cuff of her slacks and crawled to her Achilles tendon, where we bit and poured in all the venom we could. Julia’s chin hit the stainless steel countertop hard as she went down.
8
THIS is how we made Julia disappear.
Julia.
“Yah?” She was awake now, albeit groggy and even talking, though her jaw was purple and weighed down by a mass the size of an orange. Her left foot was similarly warped, and kept her from running or leveling her heel on one of us.
Julia, listen.
“K …”
You are no longer to drink Coca-Cola, nor Pepsi-Cola. Royal Crown is your drink.
“What?” she said, surprised.
When you’re out at a diner or restaurant, you have the monte cristo, not the pancakes. Not the tuna salad sandwich, hold the celery, but the turkey club without the tomatoes.
“But …,” She was awkward, trying to stand. “Diners don’t … No Royal Crown.”
You may drink tea.
“Oh.”
No more Jersey City. You’ll live in Brooklyn. No more L train. You’ll take only the J, M, or Z. Your phone service will be provided by T-Mobile, not Verizon. You’ll watch American Idol, not Survivor. You’ll follow the Mets just enough to have a casual conversation with a potential lover in a bar, not the Knicks. You are Julia Ott again, not Hernandez. Sundresses, not yoga pants. Special K cereal bars for snacks, not Nutri-Grain.
You’ll consider yourself an Independent with strong Democratic leanings, and will admit to voting occasionally for Republicans if in the Nelson Rockefeller or Olympia Snowe mode. The U.S. News and World Report, not Time, not Newsweek. You’ll prefer to be on your side, in a near-fetal position, during the act of physical love. You’ll blush again, and cultivate the tick of pinching the flesh above your lip when considering two options that are both somewhat favorable.
We continued the transformation. The movement, actually, away from the world you know and into the world of the Simulacrum. The Simulacrum is not just a precise copy of the world, it is overlaid on your world, like the other half of a chessboard a particular pawn may never cross. It has everything this world does, save Hymenoepimescis sp. The Simulacrum is a web of tendencies and notions, the bakery down the block from the one you go to for your bagel. The Simulacrum is the subway stop you watch blur by as you always seem to be on an express train and it’s a local stop. The part of town where the fire hydrants are yellow rather than brick red. The ancient city an obscure writer you pretend to have read in translation was born in. It’s where rubber comes from, and alpaca blankets, and its people use the Cyrillic alphabet but only due to Stalin.
The Simulacrum is the home of men of indeterminate ethnicity, the men in which we ride. We are Plesiometa argyra. The Simulacrum is our haven, our home. We were welcoming Julia into it, to keep the world safe from her, safe from the pupating wasps in her brain and blood. We don’t believe in killing except for our own consumption needs, not anymore.
Julia, slowly coming back to herself, asked, “Why?”
You’re a danger. You killed a man. You impressed others sufficiently to fund terrorists and to create minor havoc.
“Fishman had it coming. Lots of people have it coming. And I never encouraged anyone to do anything except to express themselves.”
You’re a victim. You were stung by a wasp, do you remember? It has changed your personality. We can remove the eggs. They’ll never develop on a diet of human blood; they need us. Without us, they’ll stay within you forever, further warping your mind. We can protect you from the consequences of the decisions they influenced. In time, your peculiar urges should fade. Until then, we can keep you safe. Safe in a place between places.
She was upright now. “Victim?
I finally stopped being a victim. For once in my life I did something with my life, of my own free will, without worrying about expectations, or what people were thinking of me, or how happy my parents were or my husband was or my boss was …” she trailed off, the rest of her utterance nothing but desperate exhalations.
This is not a negotiation. It is done.
“Why don’t you just kill me? Why go through all this nonsense, offer me this laundry list of little changes?”
It never seems to work out in our favor, the killing.
“What do you mean?” Julia said, her voice light and curious again.
When you hear the answer, you will fall asleep. You will awake in a new apartment, in your new life.
“How is that any different than killing me? It’s the murder of the self, it’s—”
Archduke Ferdinand.
9
THREE months later, Julia was a driver’s license photo—chin up, strands of hair across her wide forehead, cheekbones washed out in the light of the flash—on the evening news. Six months later, she was a trivia question and the subject of several photocopied zines and abandoned websites, their links slowly dying. The world moved on, the wars ground on, and the movement flickered and died as we had hoped. A footnote in a thesis.
Julia got a new job, working from home on her computer as a customer support representative for a cable television/Internet/telephone company. For eight hours a day she tooled around her basement apartment in Astoria, Queens, handling the occasional phone call or “live” help chat. At work, Julia went by the name Undrehuh, which she believed to be the way a call center worker from Indian might say the name Andrea after taking a course in accent reduction. At the end of her work day, she tooled around the neighborhood, enjoying the wine bars and the occasional dance nights, retiring to the many diners for dishes of flaming saganaki and chilled dolmades.
Sometimes Julia wondered if she should have a child, or run off with some man she’d met via the Internet; he wanted to spank her when the dishes weren’t done and who expected to be fellated to completion each morning. She wondered about her brother, who lived in Arizona and did something with shale. Julia never thought of Raymond except when someone mentioned Margaret Mead, a circumstance which was fairly rare.