by Nick Mamatas
“Lenin believed that rest was retreat. He thought he saw the strings behind the system and wanted to do away with them. He thought electricity, and his political party, would combine to create a new world, a third world where the sphere of political will met the sphere of materiality, and with a spark”—her right hand’s index finger stabbed the air and summed up a quick waaaAAAAOOOOooo from the aether—“utopia!”
The man in front of us waved for the waitress and with a bark ordered the chicken tortilla soup. His eyeglasses had defogged; his eyes were a dead blue. He felt our stare and turned to look past us, to show that he did not care.
“If you are paying with a debit card tonight,” Julia said, “You will receive fifty thousand dollars, from me, tomorrow. It will be credited to your account.” She waved her hands over the instrument again, creating a hollow-sounding moan. It sounded like sex. “This money is not tax-free. Questions will be asked of you by your bank, your government.” There was a change in pitch.
“If you are paying with a credit card tonight, you will be granted a fifty thousand dollar credit line, not attached to your current card. The material will come in the mail to the address associated with your account within seven business days.”
“What if we pay cash?” someone shouted from the side of the room. He wore a bushy beard and straggly curls in his hair. A beret as well, too small for his head.
“You get nothing!” Julia screamed. “You are fucked, boy! You get that? Your little arbitrary decision to throw a few greasy fives onto the table means you are out of luck. You fetishize the fucking real, monkey.” A hand up raised the volume of the theremin’s rattling wash of white noise. Julia shouted over it, sounding as though she were at sea. “There is an unseen world out there. Cash is old magic, it’s the dumb wizardry of signs and tokens. Go get a pen and write your own ass a check.” Then she lifted both hands high above her outside and outside the field generated by the theremin’s antennae. The atonal buzzing began again, sounding like a refrigerator that was just about to break down for the last time.
“The world is an electronic thing. Lenin was half-right: electricity and political will led to something new, but it wasn’t the worker’s paradise of tractors and singing babushkas. It led to a world that is ready for a revelation. The Big Invisible just up and went and took five trillion dollars with it last summer. Now you know, now you all know how arbitrary the intersection between your meat-rix bodies and your matrix jobs is, eh? There was something out there, as subtle as plumbing and intimate as speech. Ook ook, Caveman Jones. And then you didn’t get to have it a month. Did the world go poof and transform back into 1987? No. We played the rests as well as the notes, and we did the best we could. And we learned something too, didn’t we?”
Julia turned purposefully away from the corner of the room at which the man who had heckled sat and addressed the rest of us. “The invisible is important. It’s new magic—in the old days we might say we had our grandfather’s axe: our father replaced the handle. We replaced the head. Now we say we have our grandfather’s axe and point to a digital photo of a pile of chopped wood. You dig me?”
She ran her hands over the space in front of her, making the theremin waowaowaowao. “Do you? Do you dig me with two g’s? Well here’s another bit of performance poetry for you to dig!” she said.
“We are not the only ones here!” Waowaowao went the invisible air. Even in our man, our mass of appendages pulling and yanking on the strands of webbing that mimics musculature—we play the rests as well as the notes—tingled from the fullness of the sound in the tiny rathskeller.
“There is another amongst us.” Vrmrmmmmzzzzzzzzaaaaoo.
“They twist and turn and fight and flex and shift and suggest. They exist within the spaces. Spiders, I tell you. A secret breed. A distributed brain covering the planet in an organic, pulsating, venomous world wide web.”
“Preach it!” It was the man who had paid in cash again. We turned as one, not just us but the human patrons as well, to glare at him. Julia ignored him this time. “We live in their web,” she said, “and they sometimes live in webs with the shape and mien of men.”
Perhaps we should thank Hymenoepimescis sp. If there was a less efficient way to try to jumpstart the understanding of Homo sapiens sapiens with regard to our existence, we could not have programmed Julia to embrace it instead of this. For a moment we contemplated letting her go free, to see how she might evolve with the parasites inside her, and with her experiences in the Simulacrum still functional enough so that she was largely unrecognizable despite the continued notoriety of her murder of Fishman and the movement it sparked. She was unique in all the world, in all three worlds, and in her own fashion she was expressing this difference, manifesting it, in front of this small crowd. There would be much to learn from observing her life cycle. Then we thought the better of it. Who knows what damage she might be able to cause in the future? The pawn who could once again be queened. Every conflagration starts with but a spark under the right conditions. Julia was still a spark, begging for air and fuel and finding little of either on that stuffy Wisconsin evening.
The lights dimmed, save for a pale blue spotlight on Julia’s narrow face. It floated in the dark. The theremin opened with a deep mmmmvvrrraaaaaow tremolo into higher pitches as Julia’s unseen hands swayed. “There is another intelligence on this earth. It is not above us, but it is beyond us. It watched us with a million unblinking eyes brachiate through the trees, trundle over the ground on heels and knuckles, pick up the stick and write the word. It’s been waiting for us for a long long time. Can you feel them, waiting for you?” The final light was brought down and we were all in the dark.
“They wait.”
The music ended as well, even the humming of the idle theremin wound down. For a long moment all was still except for the rushing of blood, and for us only, the gliding of Julia’s bare feet off the stage, and some shuffling immediately before us, a pair of breaths sharp and shallow. We waited till the lights were on to rise from our seat. The men who had been directly in front of us were already gone.
They were easy enough to find, along with Julia, in the alley behind the venue. The two men had cornered her and the theremin she held against her chest like a shield, and one had a firearm in his hand. She was by a windowless white van, its backdoors open. Mud was splattered across the license plate rather too artfully. We interrupted them by walking into what the men considered their personal space. The man without the gun—his sweater was tight against his muscled body, and he was older despite attempting the casual wardrobe of a younger person—reached into his front pocket for his wallet, and then let it drop open to show identification. “FBI. This isn’t your business, sir. Step back for your own safety.” The other agent raised his gun to Julia’s head and held it with both hands to show how much our presence did not distract his attention from the woman he hoped to capture.
We stepped forward and said, “Don’t.” The agent spun on his heel and put a bullet into the chest of the man we rode. Several of us fell from the hole and onto the dusty floor of the alley, where we fanned out to get into a better position. We were surprised and a bit impressed that the agent responded to us simply by lifting his arm a bit and shooting our head to pieces. Yet more of us fell from our man of indeterminate ethnicity—the brainpan was full—and rolled down the shoulders and chest, some of us clinging to our clothing and trying to climb back to our station. We lurched ahead despite the reduction in personnel and grabbed at the agent. Julia raised the theremin above her head and brained the other man, who was just now withdrawing his own firearm, and then bashed in the back of the head of the man with whom we were grappling. She turned and then ran back into the café, confident we’d be loath to follow. Other men of indeterminate ethnicity were nearby, but not so close as to grab Julia. Some of us went after her, to keep her under observation while the rest guided our man to the sewer drain at the far end of the alley and disincorporated the shambling vehicle of
the man so we would not be discovered.
In the café, Julia was accosted by three of the patrons, all of whom had either a Blackberry or a laptop with them. One had jokingly checked his bank account balance and did indeed find the fifty thousand dollars, which led the others to check their accounts as well. “Thanks!” one of them, a man who was dressed much like the FBI agents, but organically so, said, but he was slapped lightly on the arm by a woman with long hair severely parted down the middle.
“Are you nuts?” she said. “This is a crime!”
“It’s not a crime to give someone money,” said the other man, a thin boyish one in a T-shirt that hung around him like a sail.
“We have to file with the federal government when we deposit more than ten grand in our accounts, and explain where we got it from. Plus, this could be money laundering,” the woman explained. “Crazy things like this don’t happen for no reason, and never for a good reason.” She turned back to Julia. “Listen, I liked your performance. It was provocative, an entertainment. But you’re squicking me hardcore here. I don’t want to be a prop in your scene.”
“Well,” Julia said, “the thing of it is—” and then she dropped the theremin on the woman’s foot while scooting backwards herself. The woman screamed and clutched at her leg. The men exploded, shouting, “You crazy fucking bitch!” and one of them swung at Julia, but was too slow and tripped over the theremin itself. Julia ran back to the van, slammed the doors shut behind her and on several of us, then peeled out of the alley at high speed.
Julia drove off the highway at the first exit she could find, into a sparsely populated farming area. She cut the headlights and drove up to a small farmhouse. Luckily for her, the place she chose had a pickup truck in the driveway, and it was unlocked. The keys were even inside. “Ah, the Midwest,” she said to herself as she transported her few bags to the new car. She quickly changed her clothes and then withdrew from her purse a small palmtop computer with a GPS application. A unique random number generation subroutine chose a destination, and then altered it every few minutes (also at seemingly random intervals). Though the technique was limited by the long stretches of highways and relatively few exits that cut across Wisconsin and its neighboring states, Julia did manage to get herself to a remarkably remote area by the time she stopped to pull into a rest stop under the red candied dawn sun—there wasn’t a man of indeterminate ethnicity for a hundred miles around, and there were few enough of us in the pickup truck that we could not spin a fresh one large enough to subdue Julia or drive the car. We did start to spin a someone, however.
Julia snored in the front seat till the dew evaporated. Then there was a knock on the glass of the driver’s side door—a coincidence that actually worked to our benefit. The thin fist knocked again, almost belligerent, and Julia awoke and groggily rolled down the window after finding the handle with which to do so.
Alysse held up a picture of Julia and asked Julia, “Pardon me. I’m one of many people on a worldwide hunt for Julia Ott Hernandez. We’re knocking on doors, and any sort of portal, really, all over the planet and I was wondering if. Oh.”
In the baby of indeterminate ethnicity we built in the cab of the truck, we initiated a hysterical wailing. Neither Julia nor Alysse could ignore it. It was a cry that called out to their very chromosomes. Julia jumped in her seat and tried to swing the door open, but Alysse caught most of the force with a wiry strength and managed to shut the door again on Julia’s leg. She reached in and grabbed the keys from the ignition, and got Julia’s elbow in her teeth in exchange. Alysse spun away from the car, bleeding from the mouth, and whirled around, throwing the keys into the wooded area right on the lip of the rest stop. We howled for attention, and people in the two other cars—one a recreational vehicle and the other a small hatchback—began to stir. Alysse went low and tried to tackle Julia as she limped out of the car, but Julia pivoted her hips and spun on her good heel. Alysse slid past her and nearly banged her head on the side of the stolen pickup as she skidded to a stop.
The man in the hatchback stuck his head out the sunroof and waved a cell phone. “I’m calling 911!” he announced. “I’m calling 911!” Then he rested his elbows on the roof and watched Alysse and Julia square off. Alysse’s baggy light blue button-up shirt was spotted with blood from her bleeding mouth. Julia was game and a head taller, but limping badly and her left pant leg was soaked and sticking to the flesh.
“My gawd, why are you fighting?” shouted a heavyset women from the RV as she approached the truck. She popped open the door to the cargo area and fetched the baby we’d spun from it. “You two whores should be on your knees right now, begging the Lord for forgiveness!” Alysse stopped and looked chagrined, but danced out of the way when Julia lurched toward her. We needed to introduce more uncertainty into the situation, so one of us crawled from the mouth of our baby and bit the woman carrying us in the arm. She yowled and fell to her knees, clutching us tightly. Then the man in the hatchback finally flipped open his cell phone and called the police.
“Grab that baby,” Julia said to Alysse. “We’re out of here!” Experiencing a moment of latah, Alysse obeyed instantly and snatched us away from the heavy woman, who was beginning to go into shock from our venom. Alysse rushed to the pickup and slid into the passenger seat. Julia limped past her. “Get out, moron!” she said to Alysse. “You threw the keys away.” Then Julia marched to the RV and hoisted herself up into it. Alysse followed immediately. The doors slammed, the engine roared to life and Julia backed it out of the spot.
“Don’t run over that lady,” Alysse said.
Something groaned from the back of the RV.
“Go take off your top and have sex with whoever is back there,” said Julia. “It’s probably the husband.”
“Uhm, what about this baby?”
“I’ve never seen that baby before in my life,” Julia said matter-of-factly. “Does it look like me? Would you think someone would leave a baby in a pickup for me to steal and it would just start crying at the very dramatic moment it did? Think about it, girl, there are forces beyond comprehension manipulating us at every turn.”
“True,” Alysse said. “But I’m beyond that sort of thing.”
Julia snorted. “For example, didn’t you leave your car behind just now? Haven’t you been swept up into an entirely different scenario than what you anticipated?
“Oh no,” said Alysse. “I walked to the rest stop. I’d been walking all morning. I wasn’t just looking you as part of”—Alysse twisted her wrist—“I was also walking. I’ve been walking all month and blogging about it as part of a campaign to raise awareness for oil-addiction and alternative forms of transportation.”
“I didn’t realize that feet were an alternative form of transportation,” Julia said. Alysse had no response to that. “Do I really have to have sex with that guy back there?” He groaned again and nearly fell from his couch.
“Whatever, just keep him busy. What state is this, by the way? I’ve been driving all night at insane and illegal speeds.” “Ohio.”
“Of course. Which way is Hamilton!, Ohio?”
“Hamilton!” Alysse shouted with a smile, and she pointed down the highway. Then she got up, put us down on a bench, from which we nearly slid to the floor of the RV, and began to unbutton her blouse.
23
HAMILTON! Ohio is a name one must practically shout, as the signage on the roads leading into the city all have an exclamation point at the end of the name. Alysse and Julia took turns shouting “Hamilton!” as they drove toward the city, and when they shouted so too did the man Alysse had tied to the fold-out couch with strips of her blouse, except that he was also gagged by the cups of Alysse’s bra. Alysse had selected an oversized flannel shirt from the tiny closet space and wore that instead.
“What gender is the baby?” Alysse asked. She turned her head to look back at us.
“Dunno, didn’t check. I imagine it’s probably flat in the genitalia,” Julia said. She told Al
ysse what she had pieced together, about Plesiometa argyra and the men of indeterminate ethnicity. Then she shouted “Hamilton!” as she saw a highway sign (though it lacked the exclamation point the city’s own signs have) and Alysse joined in and the man in the back of the RV growled through his bra-gag.
“Say,” Alysse said, turning back again, “is your name Hamilton?” Hamilton nodded, his eyes large but cracked with red veins. His face was purplish-drunk but shifting toward hangover-gray. “Wow, that is a bizarre coincidence!”
Julia jerked the steering wheel hard nearly sending us off the chair on which we lay. She pulled the RV to a quick stop on the shoulder of the road and clicked on the hazard lights. “Forty-five seconds,” she told Alysse. “We have to keep moving.” She turned the radio on and quickly found a tinny AM station on which a preacher was going on about Revelations, then cranked it up.
“Hello, Hamilton,” Julia said, leaning over her captive. “If you act up, I’m going to stomp on that baby’s head.” She pointed to us. And then spiders will pour out of it.” Hamilton flexed against the strips of shirt binding him. “Looks like she was a Girl Scout, eh, with such knot-tying ability. Anyway, Hamilton, this is not some kind of Thelma and Louise thing, really.” She drew herself up and put a finger to her chin, considering. “I mean, I did shoot a man, but his gender was incidental. Incidental to my shooting him, that is. Certainly, he benefited from being male throughout his business career and was able to interact with a variety of old boy’s networks, the Mafia, City Hall, and all those other male-dominated spaces thanks to his gender and his roly-poly mien.”