by Marc Zicree
Panic rises in my throat.
Cal looks down at our grunter Sacajawea and asks, “Is there something you want to tell us, Howard?”
The little guy blinks up at Cal through his mirrored shades. “Like what?”
“Like, do these people consider Magritte a deity, or a demon, or what?”
“Let’s just get the hell out of here,” I whisper, tensing to run.
Colleen catches my arm in a steel grip. “Chill, Goldman.”
Before I can “chill,” whistles cut the air behind us, letting out bleat after persistent bleat. I have images of policemen on black and white skateboards in pursuit of us gatecrashers. Everyone else draws back from the center of the sidewalk at the first tweet, but we flock dead center like a bunch of domestic turkeys awaiting the hatchet.
Belatedly, we scatter, too. I grab Magritte and thrust her into the shelter of a wide archway before we are run down by three roller-bladers in Day-Glo spandex, knee pads, and helmets. Each wears a collection of fanny packs and a backpack, carries a baseball bat, and clutches a metal police whistle between his teeth. In a skirl of sound and a swirl of wind they are gone, flying ahead of us down the block. Our fellow travelers move back onto the sidewalk and continue their sojourns.
I take a deep breath and loosen my hold on Magritte, if only a little.
She peeks over my shoulder at the retreating couriers. “You okay?” The curve of her mouth suggests she is fighting the urge to laugh at me.
Before I can answer, another voice intrudes: “Is that your deva?”
“Day-vuh,” he says, and I wonder which one of us he’s mistaken for a Hindu deity. I turn, shielding Magritte with my body. It’s the Suit.
“Excuse me?”
He nods through me at Maggie. “The deva, she yours?” “Yeah, I’m his,” says Magritte. “Fuck off.” Her voice is harder, colder, more acidic than I’ve ever heard it.
The suit seems amused. “You taking her in?”
Taking her in. I’m Clueless Joe, here. “No.”
“Really? That’s quite a mouth she’s got. Could be a real annoyance after a while. Interested in selling?”
Okay. Something less than a deity, then. “Fuck off,” I say, and haul Magritte back out onto the sidewalk where the others have already collected.
“Let’s get the hell off this street,” I tell them. “Now.”
I start down Wells again at warp speed, Magritte moving in harmony. When I finally slow down a bit, Cal catches up to me and pushes me into a defunct bus stop kiosk. The rest of the crew crowds in around us. Howard dives under the bench.
“What happened back there?” Cal asks.
I want to pace, but there’s no room in the cramped quarters. I settle for shifting from one foot to the other and tapping out a rhythmic tattoo on the handle of my machete. “A suit just tried to buy Magritte off me.”
“Oh, jeez,” Colleen mutters, eyes on my face. “He’s losing it.”
Maggie leaps to my defense. “No he’s not. This guy asked if Goldie was taking me in, whatever the hell that meant. Then he tried to buy me.”
Colleen grimaces, glances at Doc, then almost meets my eyes. “Sorry, Goldie,” she mumbles, and slips to one end of the kiosk to watch the traffic flow by.
“Taking her in,” Cal repeats. “Maybe he was just asking if you meant to keep her, take care of her.”
“No, no. That wasn’t it. We’d already established that she was my flare.”
“It pissed me off,” says Magritte. “What, do I have a damned For Rent sign on my forehead?”
Cal glances up and down the street. “Okay, well, that gives us a little insight into the place. Apparently, some people are commodities here.”
“Some things never change,” says Magritte.
I ask, “Enid, do you think feedback would be a problem in here?”
He shoots me a startled glance. “Nobody’s threatened Maggie. That guy’s probably just doing business as usual. Maybe he’s a pimp.”
Maggie shakes her head. “I know pimps. He seemed more like a stockbroker.”
I glance back up the street. “Yeah, well, the stockbroker is following us. Can we blow this bus stop?”
“Let’s,” Cal says, and prods Howie out from under the bench.
Our pace isn’t brisk enough to keep the suit from overtaking us and putting himself in our path. “You didn’t wait to hear my offer,” he tells me, smiling. “I can be very generous.”
“Really? Well, I can be very violent. Please take no for an answer.” I lay a hand on my machete.
He seems not to take me seriously. “I can get all kinds of swag,” he says. “Jewelry, twenty-four karat gold, precious stones. Fresh water? I can get you fresh, clean water. And fruit.”
“She’s not for sale,” says Colleen, stepping out from behind me to face the suit. Her crossbow is aimed at his heart. “What part of this very basic concept don’t you get, mister?”
Her, he takes seriously. He stiffens, eyes the weapon, and steps back a pace, but he doesn’t give up. “She’s useless to you. Your friend here said he wasn’t planning to redeem her, so I thought perhaps…”
Colleen trades glances with me. “What do you mean, redeem her?”
An icy jolt of fear ripples through the connection between Maggie and me. I can’t tell whose it is, but I think of her uncle Nathan and sermons on salvation.
“You’re obviously not local,” says the suit. “Devas are worth a great deal around here, but you have to know the ropes, which you clearly don’t. I can act as middleman, pay you for her up front, handle the details of the redemption process myself.”
“Jesus,” says Colleen. “It’s like she’s a beer bottle or something.” Her hands flex on the crossbow as if they are just dying to take this joker out.
His eyes don’t miss this, but he persists. “If you don’t turn her in willingly, he’ll only take her away from you. You might as well derive some profit from it.”
“He?” asks Cal. “He who?”
“The Boss.” He pauses to glance at us askew. “You really are new here. Where are you from?”
“I’m from Chicago,” says Enid. “Before any of this happened. They’re from—”
“Yes, well, this Chicago is subject to the rule of law. That’s what holds it together. Specifically and especially, the law of supply and demand. I work the supply side. And trust me, there is a definite demand for her kind.”
“Why?” asks Cal. “Why her kind?”
The suit looks at Magritte, who moves farther behind me. “She’s a rare commodity, for one thing.”
“Look,” says Enid, before I can ask about the other thing. “I don’t give a shit about your laws or your demand. We’re not selling.”
He sidesteps the suit and moves off down the block. Cal gives the guy a last look and follows, pushing Howard a little ahead of him. The rest of us fall in behind.
When I glance back, the suit is gone. I feel no relief. My eyes brush Colleen’s as I face front again. We share an unlikely moment of accord.
“We might have been able to pry some information out of that guy,” Cal says.
“Yeah, maybe,” counters Colleen, “but could you stand being in the same breathing space with him for that long?”
Adams is less heavily traveled; we zig right onto it and a block later zag left onto LaSalle. We hurry; our eyes miss nothing. I find myself thinking about “the Boss.” My mind combines the historical with the virtual and conjures an image of a computer-generated guy in pinstripes and fedora with a tommy gun. Stupid, huh? I mean, tommy guns don’t even function anymore, except maybe as door stops, and these days all reality is virtual.
I scan the skyline. An impossible task; the buildings go up into a red Forever. But once or twice I think I see something large and shadowy gliding from pillar to post many, many stories above us. I decide I’d prefer it not to be real and sanguinely chalk it up to a mixed state (the bipolar equivalent of a rinse/spin cycle). It does not
occur to me to wonder, at that moment, who or what is doing the mixing. I say nothing. I find I’m less afraid of actual mania than I am of having Colleen accuse me of being manic before the world.
“Oh, man, smell that?” asks Enid as we turn onto Randolph.
Food. Cooking. I salivate, remembering that I haven’t eaten since early morning. Ahead of us, people sit in a sidewalk bistro, dining. Chefs in white uniforms grill meat and veggies on barbecues under a green and white striped awning. For a moment I imagine that we really are in Oz.
“I wonder what they use for money besides gold and water?” Cal asks.
We pass by the bistro reluctantly, wistfully, hungrily, and continue east. I notice something. While the bistro’s tables are peopled by the well-groomed and the bold-eyed, there are small knots of bashful bag-carriers clustered around the green wrought-iron perimeter as if waiting.
A little farther up the street curiosity gets the better of me when I spot a pair of the grab-bag people huddled near the doorway of a fragrant place labeled ROSE’S TEAROOM. He is white and twenty-something; she is Asian, a little older, worn and faded. Her skin is more sallow than golden, and there are bluish smudges beneath her dark eyes. The two stand, listless, speechless, shoulder-to-shoulder, looking at nothing, packages piled about their feet.
I plant myself right in front of them. “Excuse me,” I say, when they pay me no notice whatsoever. “We’re from out of town and we were, um, wondering if there might be a place nearby we could spend the night.”
The woman blinks as if a patch of empty air has just spoken, while the guy says, “Huh?” His eyes lift only momentarily to my face, then glance away to my shoe tops.
I smile. “We just got here and, well, uh, all this,” I gesture up and down the street, “is kind of a surprise.”
The two exchange glances. Hers has an element of desperation in it that is only too familiar. I saw it all the time in Manhattan: in the underground, in the streets, in the high rises.
The guy lowers his voice. “Out of town? You came from outside?” For the first time his eyes actually make it to my face. Then they dodge to a spot over my shoulder and he says, “Shit!” and leaps backward, slamming against the stone railing of the tearoom’s porch. The woman, following his gaze, gasps and clutches his arm, her eyes going wide.
It’s Maggie, of course, hovering brightly behind me.
“Look, man,” says the guy. “You just move on, okay? Just… just leave us alone.”
The woman tugs at him. “Sammy, no, they’re from outside. They got in; maybe they know a way out.”
Sammy shakes his head, eyes trying to hold mine. “They’re not really from outside, Lily.” It is a statement of fact, he’s that sure.
Doc and Cal have moved to flank me. Doc says, “I assure
you, my friend Goldie is telling you the truth.” Though he
speaks to Sammy, it’s Lily’s face he’s focused on.
“We’ve come from New York,” says Cal. “It’s taken
months to get here, but we got into Chicago just today.” “Yeah?” Sammy says. “And how’d you manage that?” “Uh, walked over the Jackson Street Bridge,” I say.
Sammy’s smile is completely mirthless. “Through the firewall?”
“The what?” Cal asks.
“When we came through,” says Doc, puzzled, “there was only a red haze. Lily, that’s your name, yes?”
She nods.
“Lily, I am a doctor. Forgive me for the observation, but you do not seem well. Are you often tired? Dehydrated?”
Now she looks at Doc as if he’s just offered to raise her from the dead.
“Don’t listen,” Sammy says. “They’re lying. He’s no doctor. And they’re not from outside, there’s no way.”
“Way,” I protest. “Maybe it looks like fire to you, but it looks like cotton candy to me. It’s neither. It’s an illusion. You know—abracadabra, hocus-pocus, magic?”
Doc slides me a bemused look, then draws Lily a little aside.
“Yeah?” says Sammy. “Some illusion. I saw a guy get third-degree burns from your hocus-pocus, bud.”
I feel Cal’s sudden and intense interest like a hot flash. “What did you say? Third-degree…”
“Burns,” repeats Sammy. “You heard me.”
“But outside,” murmurs Lily, still listening. “If there’s really something left outside—”
“Lily, please,” says Doc, his voice gentle. “Do you have pain here?” His hands are equally gentle as he draws her head back around and probes the sides of her neck just below her jaw.
“There’s nothing outside,” says Sammy.
“Says who?”
He looks at me as if I’m speaking in tongues. “Everybody knows, man. It just is.”
It just is. Resignation? Hypnosis? Mass hysteria? “So what do you do here?” Cal asks.
Sammy glances sideways at Lily. “Mostly wait… and starve. While she’s in there. They really don’t give a shit if you go hungry all day while they screw around.”
“They?” Cal shakes his head.
“Them.” Sammy shakes his head. “Shit, you’re freebies, aren’t you?”
Sigh. And me without my handy Traveler’s Guide to PostApocalyptic Slang.
“What the hell are you doing?” The female voice is as chill and biting as Chicago’s normal winter weather.
We look up and gawk like a herd of startled deer. I hear Howard snuffle and assume he has found something to hide behind.
She stands four steps above us in the open door of Rose’s Tearoom, dressed impeccably in a charcoal-gray wool pantsuit, hair and makeup perfect, expression outraged. “Why are you harassing my people?”
Her people.
Cal smiles his most clean-cut, all-American litigator smile and says, “Just asking for information. We’re from… out of town.”
We watch her reaction with great interest: the widening of the eyes, the arching of the brows, the lifting of the head. Her eyes go immediately to Magritte, and the expression in them changes. Then the She-Suit checks each of us over carefully, picking at this and that, lingering on the armament, which most of us carry in plain sight.
She focuses on Doc, perhaps because he is unarmed, or perhaps because he stands so close to one of “her people.” “Are these your bodyguards, sir?” she asks him.
I swivel my head toward Doc and mouth, Say yes.
He does, without batting an eyelash.
Her whole manner mutates, going from challenge to chagrin in the turn of a phrase. “I apologize if I was rude, but armed as they are, they tend to intimidate. Then again, I suppose that’s why you have them.” She offers an uneasy smile.
At this point, Doc, God bless him, sees a window of opportunity for his particular passion. “I could not help but notice,” he says, “that this woman’s color is not good. She is dehydrated and her glands are swollen. If she is in your employ, I would recommend that you allow her several days of rest and that she see a doctor. I don’t know what the state of medicine is here, but surely something can be done for her.” The she-suit reddens and glances from Lily to Doc. “You … you want her to see a doctor?”
Doc smiles. “I am, myself, a physician. Unfortunately, I have nothing with me that might help.”
I don’t know which reaction makes me the queasiest, the She-Suit’s nostril-flaring, eye-rolling expression of silent fury or Lily’s abject fear.
“You want her to see a doctor,” she repeats.
Doc hesitates, puzzled. “It would be for the best, yes. And her diet—if she could have leafy vegetables it would be very good, although I realize they may be hard to obtain.”
Not according to the menu posted in the tearoom’s front window. Spinach salad is right at the top of the leafy green list. I don’t grok the price units. There are symbols in column B, but none of them are dollar signs.
Faces have appeared in the window to peer out at us, and an animated dialogue is taking place behind the glass.
I catch Colleen’s eye and incline my head toward the window.
She looks, steps to Doc’s side and lays a hand on his arm, but he’s too involved in the task of saving Lily to notice. She gives the arm a gentle shake. “Viktor, we need to go.”
Doc nods and looks back to the she-suit. “My friend reminds me that we have an appointment. Please, if you are able, see that Lily gets to a doctor.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” She glances from Doc to Magritte and adds, “sir.” She watches as we move away up Randolph.
When I glance back, a man has joined her on the steps. Without a word to Sammy or Lily, they fade back into the tearoom.
Okay, that was disturbing. I find my legs are suddenly heavy and loath to move the farther we get from the tearoom and the two unfortunate people left waiting and starving there.
“Why was that woman so deferential to me?” Doc wonders as we drag our demoralized bones up the block.
“You were unarmed,” suggests Cal. “She took us for bodyguards and figured you must be the VIP we were protecting. Also, of the lot of us, you’re arguably the most presentable, except for Magritte.”
True enough. Doc, even in his fleece-lined, buffalo plaid jacket, still looked the part of a distinguished, if shaggy, professor.
“Her people,” murmurs Colleen. “God, that makes me sick.”
Cal chews his lip and worries his sword hilt. “Sammy seemed completely convinced there was no way out of here.”
Colleen puts a hand on his arm. “Yeah, what was all that about a firewall?”
Cal carefully describes the opaque red goo that ate Jackson Street and I repeat what Magritte said about it not being real.
Colleen echoes Sammy. “Not real? What’s not real that causes third-degree burns?”
“Oooh, is this a riddle?” I don’t mean to sound glib, but sometimes glib just pops out of my mouth.
Colleen ignores me and Cal looks uneasy. “Magritte,” he says, “when you went back up Jackson into the … the cloud, did you feel as if you might be in danger?”
“No. It was a mirage.”
“Maybe it’s only a mirage if you’re a flare,” says Colleen. “Maybe for normals like us, it’s a one-way street.”
Chilling words.