Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  Marcus

  What were you doing, Jamie?

  Marcus popped open a boiled peanut, warm salty water splashing his khakis. He mushed the peanut between his teeth.

  Mother sat with her finger to her lips as she often did, a librarian constantly shooshing the world. She crossed her legs, adjusted her dress by pinching the fabric off her knee, bobbing her saddled foot (the nails shellacked fire red) in long, even strokes, and watched the children kick a blue rubber ball through the water.

  We were so close, he continued thinking. Did you find what we were looking for? Did they drag you down here and put you to sleep? Or did you elude me, go off to search on your own and get caught?

  It was impossible to elude him. Marcus could feel anyone he set his mind on, could sense their presence in this big world, their identity pinging on his inner radar. It was how he found Margaret, how he knew the barkeep was hiding her—he just closed his eyes and saw her in the tavern.

  But Jamie disappeared in Chicago.

  She had gone into the Bank of America to speak with a man named Mr. Connick and never came out. Marcus and she had an agreement—she would help him find the powers-that-be and he would set Paul and Raine free. Making deals was his style. But she knew things he didn’t. He didn’t understand how that was possible, but there were still things that eluded him. This was one.

  One to lead, one to dream. One to bleed. The son to be.

  The prophecy was the only explanation. The prophecy. It sounded so scripted, a Hollywood fable of magic orcs and invisible rings.

  Children squealed delightfully in the short geysers of Atlanta’s Centennial Park. They were a mix of races in bathing suits, arms out, legs pumping, chasing blue beach balls between gurgling pillars of water.

  A man emerged from the shadows of the trees that surrounded the park. Despite the heat, he was layered in old clothing, scratching patchy whiskers like a sweltering rash.

  Had Jamie come upon evidence that would lead him to the powers-that-be, there was a chance he wouldn’t have made good on his end of the bargain. To take Paul and Raine from the Settlement would have taken time, precious time, away from his search for the powers-that-be. She didn’t understand the significance of what he was doing, what it meant to the human race.

  “I wouldn’t let you do that to her,” Mother said.

  “Stop it.”

  “You promised her, Marcus.”

  “You, of all people, speaking of betrayal. I’ve lost the will to find the humor.”

  She didn’t bother replying. This conversation had no tracks in their history since he’d awakened a brick. And when she’d appeared to him as if in the flesh, he tried to strangle her. Violence will not solve your problems, she said.

  He didn’t bother denying his intentions about Jamie. To say otherwise would’ve been a lie, and she knew his thoughts. So be it. He planned to use her for his own end, but it was a worthy end that served all humankind. How could that be selfish?

  “Which is she?” he asked, watching the homeless man approach. “The one to lead? The one that dreams or bleeds?”

  Mother didn’t answer. She described the prophecy as a koan, a question without an answer, which was bullshit. A question ceases to be a question when it has no answer.

  Marcus was the son to be, that he was certain. The truth vibrated in his bones, but the other three… who were they? And what were their roles?

  Jamie could be the one that leads. She brought us here. But did she dream? He looked across Centennial Park. She was certainly one to bleed.

  “You spare anything?” the homeless man asked. “Dollar or two. Cup of coffee, you know?”

  He moved directly in front of Marcus, smelling of tangy sweat and smoke. He was probably born in Atlanta, never got his birthright dose of biomites. Maybe his mother stole it. He didn’t go to school, found drugs as a reasonable substitute. When Georgia turned clay, he wasn’t purged during the conversion.

  Marcus set the paper bag of boiled peanuts to the side and wiped his hands on his pants. Wet streaks remained on his thighs. If only he could remove the lingering guilt this way, wipe his intended betrayal of Jamie off like dirt. Was that the reason for the prophecy, to tie the four of us together? So I couldn’t do this alone?

  It seemed impossible that Mother could make it that way, but she seemed to know things he didn’t, doling them out when needed, holding back when he went in the wrong direction.

  “What’s your name?” Marcus asked.

  “Franklin. Like Benjamin.”

  “Benjamin Franklin?”

  “Just Franklin, you know.”

  Franklin’s engorged pupils were half-hidden in droopy lids. He continued talking words that didn’t seem to connect, like a verbal stream with a valve to stem the flow broken. Only when he needed to say something did he pull the right words together.

  Marcus cracked another shell. He cleared his throat, leaning back to reach in his pocket for a fold of bills. The homeless man’s hand snapped open, dry lips fluttering a string of hopeful nonsense. Marcus slapped the bills in his palm and closed the man’s hand into a fist.

  The tenor of Franklin’s voice rose. “Thank you, thank you, thank you… God-God-God bless you, sir. God bless you.”

  He bowed three times then stomped a straight line toward the street.

  “That was charitable,” Mother said.

  The guilt lifted from him, if only momentarily. If he could do it all again, go back to Chicago, maybe he would go into the bank instead of Jamie, look Mr. Connick in the eye and hope to see a trail that led all the way to the powers-that-be. That way she wouldn’t be gone and he wouldn’t be sitting in Atlanta. But he’d be alone.

  One to lead, one to dream…

  He tossed a shelled peanut on his tongue, throwing his head back as he did, and sucked the salt. The homeless man jaywalked through traffic. A cop stood on the curb and didn’t say a word.

  “Today is a good day, Marcus. You picked a good day for today.”

  “A little hot.”

  For a moment, all he heard was her laughter. It blotted out the water and the children—their squeals and giggles and cries. Mother’s laughter used to light a bitter fire in his chest. It wasn’t always that way, but he’d grown accustomed to her joy, the bubbly laugh that climbed guffaws to a peak and dropped off with a sigh. Begrudgingly, her laughter made him smile.

  “That’s what people say,” she said. “You’ve become good at that, Marcus.”

  Commenting on the weather, that was what people did when they didn’t know what else to say. Yes, he’d mastered the things that people said in conversation, becoming so adept at blending that he disappeared in a crowd. No one remembered him. But she meant it differently than that, like he’d become good at acting human.

  A second police officer had joined the cop that ignored Franklin’s jaywalking. They watched Marcus behind tinted lenses. Another man was watching nearby. No uniform, but similar sunglasses.

  Jamie is the one to lead, he decided.

  She led him into the middle of Georgia, where the presence of the powers-that-be was strong. He could never locate the man that controlled the world, the man that decided the wars, the recessions. Who would die, who would live.

  His energy was all over the world. It was like locating the cricket singing in the forest, the needle in the haystack, the grain of sand on an endless beach. He was hiding in plain sight, yet Marcus couldn’t see him.

  He was everywhere. He was everything. But the powers-that-be felt stronger in Atlanta.

  “Prejudice is shortsighted, Marcus,” Mother said. “You’re assuming it’s males that commit great misdeeds.”

  This was her narrative to avoid hunches. Marcus assumed the powers-that-be was a man because it felt like a man. No, he couldn’t locate this presence, but it felt masculine. She reminded him not to be fooled by filtered thoughts, that men and women could be equally lost.

  He would often remind her that the great perpetrator
s of human suffering were male, that history supported his prejudice. Adolf Hitler, Vlad the Impaler, Josef Stalin… the list was long.

  “Elizabeth Bathory,” she responded. The woman that bathed in virgin blood.

  Touché.

  A rubbery thunk resounded from the ringed fountains. The blue ball went sky-high to the children’s delight, pinballed off their hands and skipped across the ground, a perfect wicket shot between Mother’s legs.

  Two children raced over, their skin beaded like waxed vinyl, and dug the ball from between her legs.

  “I’ll miss this, Marcus.”

  “We didn’t come here to die.”

  “I’ll miss the freedom.”

  She followed the children, lifting her skirt and dancing through the puddles like a lost child of Neverland, twirling until the hem of her dress circled around her, tossing her wide-brimmed hat (the ribbon a long yellow tail that fluttered). The water, however, did not splash at her feet. But she danced. She laughed.

  Again, he begrudgingly smiled.

  The illusion of separateness, she once told him, is invigorating.

  She was never human, this he knew. She was once the artificial intelligence that watched humankind, the dome of power that monitored the human population’s biomite levels, absorbing their thoughts and intentions, calculating the future, guiding humankind. Marcus was supposed to watch her; he was the safeguard to keep her from becoming sentient.

  And that was a joke.

  She had attained sentience without anyone knowing—a self-aware being that existed within the confines of an enormous dome in Montana. Within those gritty walls were the scaffolding, the fuses and motherboards that gave her life. She did what no one thought possible—had become sentient. She did what Marcus didn’t think possible.

  Turned him into a brick.

  There were five cops now. Three of them were near the curb. Some of the parents called for their children. One of the mothers weaved between the Olympic geysers to grab a little girl with a waterlogged diaper.

  Mother returned laughing and sighing as she fell on the bench, not a drop of water on her. The playground quickly emptied, children with towels over their shoulders, parents ushering them to the far side, looking over their shoulders. Some already had their phones pointed at him.

  Half a dozen uniformed officers were spread around the park. Another half a dozen in plainclothes. He didn’t have to turn around to count the ones behind him. Marcus couldn’t feel them (they were clay, after all) but sensed the electronic chatter through their phones, their transmissions as easy for Marcus to intercept as a bouncing blue ball.

  Marcus finished the last of the peanuts.

  “The truth is not what you expect,” Mother said.

  “It never is.”

  “And that’s why it eludes you.”

  He had learned that lesson well, yet she continued to preach it. The truth is not what you expect. As if there was something else more shocking than waking up to discover you’re a brick. There was nothing that could surprise him more than that.

  A preliminary wave passed through his body. It started at the crown of his head and finished at his toes. It was cool like a shadow passing overhead, a predator with its wings spread open. Margaret felt that sensation in the tavern just before the agents came inside; she mistook it for a cold memory jumping out of the dark like memories sometimes do.

  “Are you ready?” Mother asked.

  He balled the brown bag, squeezing it between his hands. Jamie’s death led him to this moment. Before this, he had lived a life of unfettered freedom. Before that, he was clay. He realized that he preferred this body now, the body of a brick. The body Mother had given him. He realized this, begrudgingly.

  Perhaps I am the one to bleed.

  Blocks away, a siren whined.

  Authorities had positioned themselves around the spitting park, men and women holding rigid stances, hands folded. Some had joined the gathering group of uniformed police officers. The plainclothed agents were not from the police department. They had come from the reflective building across the park.

  The fifth floor.

  Another wave entered Marcus, this one deeper. It shook his bones, sinking its teeth into tissue and muscle. He tensed reflexively.

  “Let them in, Marcus.”

  Surrender was difficult. He had been in complete control of his thoughts and emotions for so long. Giving that up was shocking. He was indeed attached to that freedom. Addicted to it.

  A human trait, after all.

  “They need to believe they’re in control.” She stood in the sun, her hat casting a meshed shadow. “Allow.”

  The human race had no idea just how powerless they were, didn’t know about a pervasive powers-that-be—a man that controlled their fate, turned the dials of their lives, carved the tracks of their desires.

  And ate their dreams.

  Dancing monkeys, they were. Pathetic, self-consumed beings blinded by their own brilliance, enamored by their own existence all while being marched to the end of a plank. Marcus was once one of them.

  When the third wave arrived, Marcus allowed them in, let them bind with his biomites. The remote hunger seized control of his body, plunged him into dark water, filled him with thick emotions, coal dust in his lungs, water in his ears.

  Mother tucked her hand into the frozen curl of his fingers.

  The lower echelon of police officers stayed at the perimeter while clay authorities (the crushers, the halfskins called them; a name they used to scare their children into eating their vegetables, the crushers will come for you if you don’t) closed the gap. Several of them monitored tablets or phones. A woman stopped just short of where he was sitting.

  “Marcus Anderson.” She didn’t ask, just announced it. “You are held in suspended animation for… possessing biomites in a sovereign clay state…”

  Men and women stood off to the side with eyes on their tablets. Any sign of struggle, any indication they were losing control and they’d drop a lethal jolt into his nervous system. As omnipotent as he felt, he was not immortal. He had his limits.

  “You got to be fucking me,” a bald, black man muttered. “Marcus Anderson.”

  The brick that disappeared.

  The brick the federal government claimed had died of malfunction.

  The brick the conspiracy theorists claimed was still alive, walking the earth like a holy man righting wrongs, that he would come again one day, rise from the dead and bring his justice to the world.

  Marcus Anderson just appeared on their radar, a blip out of nowhere.

  Jamie led him to this moment. A moment he was made for, the purpose given to him to rescue the world. He would defend the meek and inherit the earth, serve God and find the devil. For if the powers-that-be were hiding in plain sight, then he would find him.

  The authorities made him stand. With ten people surrounding him, with cameras capturing footage for newsfeeds and YouTube uploads, he was marched out of the park.

  ______

  The cell was white.

  A solid bench jutted from the wall to Marcus’s left, smudge marks on the white paint from a previous detainee’s soled shoes or something hard and rubber. Mother sat crossed-legged and barefoot, nails still cheery red. The sun hat was gone.

  Marcus stood in front of a wire-embedded window, the biomite freeze locking his muscles into rigid beams, a full electric wrap, an invisible suit of ants continuously stinging his flesh; unseen welts swelled and itched. His lungs sipped oxygen at a predetermined pace of expanding and contracting.

  Like breathing through a bendy straw.

  Fulton Country law enforcers, mostly uniformed, milled about the office, occasionally looking into the cell. Above their heads, a television played silent images of a newsfeed, choppy footage of Centennial Park interspersed with clips of his previous life as a federal agent.

  A LONG-LOST BRICK SURFACES?

  A door opened somewhere to the right. A booming voice, the kind
that projected effortlessly, that didn’t need a mic in a large room, called out. Donald Gainey, director of Fulton County biomite authorities, stood outside the window.

  Robust and round, his stomach hid his belt buckle. The jacket a size too small. His squinty brown eyes (the kind that suspected every living organism of mischief) focused on Marcus.

  “Is he clamped?” Don asked.

  “Yeah,” the sheriff, a slimmer version of the ruddy-cheeked director, said. “Has been since the park.”

  “Then why is he cuffed?”

  “Feds requested it.”

  “Overkill, don’t you think, Larry?”

  “It’s what they wanted. Said they’d be here in a couple hours and not to take chances.”

  “He ain’t breaking the biomite clamp.” Don rattled the door handle. “Even if he could, he’s not opening the door.”

  “It’s what they wanted, Don.”

  A guttural acknowledgement rattled, a sound a rhino might make before it charged. Don pulled a pair of reading glasses from his coat and snapped a folder taut without breaking eye contact with Marcus. Once the glasses were balanced on the knobby end of his nose, he looked down.

  Mother got up, her bare feet padding carefully on the hard floor, and passed through the wall. She paced around the authorities. “They’re afraid of you, Marcus.”

  Of course they are.

  The folder was thick. The details sorted. If Marcus could read clay, he would know Don’s thoughts. But the facial expressions were easy enough to translate. He was thinking the plastic cuffs biting Marcus’s wrists weren’t such a bad idea anymore. A sour expression hit Don, a sudden waft of dog shit or a rancid thought.

  “So he just appeared out of nowhere?”

  “That’s what they said. His identity popped up in Centennial Park.”

  “Out of the blue.”

  “Just like that.”

  “Sure that’s him?” Don ditched the glasses.

  “Identity confirmed, Don.”

  “And now the whole goddamn world knows,” he muttered.

  Mother stepped back inside the cell. In times like this, she did the sort of things that appeared normal. Sometimes she’d file her nails or read a book—anything to make her seem human. It made Marcus feel normal, like he belonged to the world. This time, she sat quietly.