Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  Taylor, in a feat of incredible strength that surely would have killed a lesser mortal, sat himself up on the edge of the bed and waited patiently to puke his guts out. Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard must have seen him, because they stopped in their tracks. They turned, took one look at Taylor, quickly plotted the likely vector of Taylor’s potentially imminent puke stream, and skittered and hopped their way out of same. Taylor, however, did not puke his guts out. What he did was, he sat there a moment, making weird faces as he surveyed the room, which appeared to have been professionally ransacked, strewn as it was with dirty clothes, beer bottles, bags of worthless junk, burnt-out circuit boards, gutted Viewers, wires, knobs, plastic syringes, pages torn out of paperback books, assorted collections of cigarette butts, and all of this sprinkled with jagged shards and crunchy nuggets of broken glass, and spattered with blood, and what he did was, Taylor, as quietly as he possibly could ... he asked Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard exactly what the fuck they thought they were doing.

  “The fuck are you doing?”

  “Who? Uth?”

  Rusty Braynard spoke with a lisp.

  “Yeth. You,” Taylor mocked him. “Thee anybody elth in here?”

  “Asshole,” Alice Williams interjected.

  “I thlithed my foot on thome fucking glath.”

  “I can fucking see that. What’s with the dancing?”

  “Danthing?”

  “Or whatever the fuck you were doing.”

  “I don’t underthand.”

  Taylor gave up. They didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. By this time they had probably forgotten how it started. They both had that Tuesday morning look ... the bug-eyed mono-maniacal stares, the lockjaw grins, the fluttering fingers that looked like they were playing scales on a pair of invisible miniature pianos. The other person was some greasy little punk who was missing some teeth, and was maybe Chinese, who Taylor had never seen in his life. He wondered if Taylor might have a cigarette. Taylor wondered if maybe the punk would like to suck one out of his ass. The punk didn’t seem to want to do that, so Taylor went ahead and started getting his boots on. Meyer Jimenez was already up and cooking something pungent in the kitchen. It smelled like maybe pigeon paella. Claudia’s Husband of the Week was snoring. Coco Freudenheim, who never really slept, was calling Dexter a silly belly and pleading with someone who wasn’t there to witness what a silly little belly he was. Aside from the sappy funereal music, which the Public Viewer had gone back to playing, all this was just like any other morning. Somewhere in here Rusty Braynard had cleaned up his foot and found some shoes, which might have been Alice Williams’ shoes, and he was down on their futon wedging them on, and Alice Williams was helping him tie them. The greasy little possibly Chinese punk, the only one currently in the bedroom who wasn’t futzing with a pair of shoes, had moonwalked his way to the two big windows that looked out onto Mulberry Street. He was standing there, gazing out like a moron, his body bathed in the cool blue light that spilled from the screens of the Public Viewers, which lit him up nicely for the Intra-Zone snipers ... which, OK, probably weren’t out there, because they hadn’t mistaken the punk for Taylor and fired about two hundred high-velocity rounds through his chest in a tightly-grouped pattern. * Then again, Taylor reasoned, they might have been showing some discipline for once and just lying up there on those fucking rooftops waiting for him to exit the building. This, however, was extremely unlikely, snipers being notoriously twitchy, and not so discerning when it came to their targets, and ... whatever. He’d find out soon enough.

  He tied off the laces of his jungle boots, peeled off his bloody, canal-stinking T-shirt, pulled on another odoriferous T-shirt that was lying in a ball at the foot of his futon, and that wasn’t spattered with a Watcher’s blood, grabbed a half a beer off the floor, drained it, belched, got to his feet, and then lurched in a more or less John Wayne fashion down the submarine-like hallway. He staggered past Coco’s and Meyer’s rooms, Claudia’s room, Dodo’s alcove, Sylvie’s nook, through the kitchen, and into the tiny makeshift bathroom, firmly intending to take a big dump. He felt like, if he took this dump, and maybe puked, and got another beer down, he might be able to clear his head enough to make a run for Cassandra’s ... assuming, that is, he wasn’t cut to shreds the moment he stepped out the door.

  His progress was interrupted briefly by some female Anti-Social Person who was stretched out naked in the filthy bathtub, ankles and wrists draped over the rim, eyes wide open, staring at nothing. It looked like maybe she’d spent the night there, probably tripping on MDLX, which meant she was one of Claudia’s friends, most of whom Taylor had fucked at some point, but this one didn’t look at all familiar. She didn’t seem to be going anywhere, so Taylor went ahead and took his dump.

  Minutes later, he was back in the kitchen, where Meyer Jimenez, who was on Taylor’s kill-list, was stirring a pot of pigeon paella, acting like he didn’t know what was happening. He stood there blithely, ignoring Taylor, stirring away with his huge wooden spoon, as if he had never heard of Sarah, or Adam, and was just some random asshole Taylor had slapped around for no reason, who didn’t have anything to do with anything. Meyer, as ever, was drenched with sweat from head to toe, and stank like rum, and the bottle of rum was there beside him, and his seersucker suit was sticking to him, and the kitchen smelled like garlic and saffron and only slightly of Taylor’s dump. Taylor stood there glaring at him. Meyer looked up from his pot of paella. He peered out at Taylor through the sweat-streaked lenses of his glasses, which he wore on the tip of his nose. He seemed on the verge of saying something, or asking or possibly explaining something. Taylor, who had heard enough from Meyer (who was fortunate Taylor hadn’t already killed him), turned and walked back down the hallway. If he somehow managed to survive the morning, he’d come back and deal with Meyer later. And if not ... well, it wouldn’t matter .

  Back in his room at the end of the hall, Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, dressed in their neon yellow track suits, were down on the floor on their hands and knees, digging through boxes of “important papers.” They were searching for their CRS IDs. They looked like giant yellow raccoons with some kind of neurological damage. The punk was standing just behind them, making this high-pitched whining noise that Taylor didn’t need to be hearing at the moment, and was just about to put a violent end to, when the voice of bug-eyed, orange-haired woman, the talking head on the Public Viewer, informed the residents of Mulberry Street that the time at the tone would be 0600. That was it ... it was time to go.

  Taylor got down on his knees, fished his backpack out of the duffel that was under the bed beside the box, opened it up, and there it all was ... the change of socks, the GoGo bars, brand new toothbrush, bottles of water, counterfeit Travel Pass, homemade pacifier ... all of which was useless now. He took the Travel Pass. That would be evidence. And the GoGo bars. He left the rest. He shoved the pack back under the bed, pushed himself up off the floor, staggered back down the hall once more, passing everyone’s rooms as before, back through the kitchen, adrenaline flowing, scrotum tightening, anus contracting, past Meyer Jimenez, nostrils flaring, and out the door of Apartment 2E of 16 Mulberry Street, forever.

  He didn’t say goodbye to anyone, not even Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, who he knew would wonder, in the years to come, what had happened to him, how he’d died, or whether, maybe, he hadn’t died, and had made it out to the Autonomous Zones, which everyone knew didn’t really exist, which meant, deep down, they would know he was dead. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, badly (i.e. say goodbye, or something anyway), but he couldn’t, and he couldn’t even flash them a look, because that wasn’t what he normally did. He had to stick to his normal routine. She had drilled that into him, Sarah had, back before the plan went sideways. And now, even if the plan had gone sideways and everything was basically fucked all to hell, that didn’t mean it was time to get reckless. Assuming they hadn’t yet found Bodroon, or at least hadn’t yet identified his body, and
that there weren’t snipers all over the rooftops, odds were, he could still get to Cassandra’s .

  He made his way down the stairs in the dark, navigating by the glimmer of light that spilled in through the shattered windows that looked out onto the disgusting airshaft that rose up through the center of the building, the ledges of which were crawling with pigeons, cooing and shitting all over everything. Just as he reached the first floor landing, the corner of which some Anti-Social asshole had decided to use as a toilet ... KA-BOOM! Something exploded outside, or was taken out by a tactical missile, or something ... he couldn’t be sure what it was, because now there were hundreds of panicked pigeons spiraling up the airshaft beside him, flying sideways, mid-air colliding, beating each other apart with their wings ... and OK, this was it, he guessed, because odds were they were walking them in, and they’d put the next one right down the airshaft, and that one he would never hear, and ...

  Valentina

  Meanwhile, twenty-three kilometers away, in a world of comfort and infinite abundance, which Taylor Byrd had never seen, except of course on the screen of a Viewer, Valentina Briggs was sitting quietly, doing nothing, trying to detach. Her half-closed eyes were focused on a patch of wall where there was nothing to see. She sat there, fixedly, kneeling on the floor, her buttocks resting on her upturned feet, hands forming an oval in her lap, thumbs ever so lightly touching, trying her best to think of not thinking. Thoughts were racing through her mind. It felt like her head was full of hamsters, soft, fat, fuzzy little hamsters, running in place inside one of those wheels, running and running, then stopping for a moment, then running and running, then stopping again, then running and running for all they were worth, then stopping again and looking confused, like the poor little things just could not fathom why they could never seem to get to wherever hamsters were always trying to go.

  Valentina Briggs observed and acknowledged the running in place of the cognitive hamsters without judgment and allowed them to run. She did not attempt to prevent them from running, or impatiently wait for them to finish running, or pray that the One would stop them running, or judge them, or herself, at all. Instead she concentrated on her breathing, in through one nostril, out through the other, in through that one, and out through the other, and sat there silently staring at nothing, and tried again to think of not thinking. The more she tried to think of not thinking, the more aware she became of how the thoughts she was trying to think of not thinking were multiplying within her mind. A lot of these thoughts were not even thoughts. They were more like random furry blobs of meaningless proto-cognitive matter, the only conceivable purpose of which was to make it impossible for her to detach, and stare at nothing, and think of not thinking.

  The air-conditioning was on some setting designed to simulate frostbite conditions. It had been on this setting for several hours. The tips of her fingers were turning blue. Her hands were numb. Her feet were freezing. Her paraspinal muscles were spasming. Her frontal and maxillary sinuses ached. She could see her breath. Her teeth were chattering.

  Valentina Briggs observed and acknowledged her chattering teeth and throbbing sinuses, the pain in her upper thoracic region, and the cold-induced paresthesia in her fingers, and she stared at the wall, where there was nothing to see, and tried again to think of not thinking. Everything was happening for a reason ... a reason beyond our understanding. She, Valentina Constance Briggs, despite her present circumstances, was still a single grain of sand on the endless beach where time met space, an indestructible, eternal part of the infinite, interwoven fabric of the spaceless, timeless, oneness of the One ... the oneness of the unnameable One ... the multiplicitous oneness of the One ...

  Valentina spoke the words, repeating the mantra on her breaths, but they did not produce that peaceful feeling of complete surrender, and she could not detach. She sat there, on the floor, on her knees, her teeth chattering, staring at a wall, sensing that, all right, whatever had happened, however it was that she had ended up here (which she’d recently remembered, but had once more forgotten), she would never be feeling that peaceful feeling of total surrender ever again. How long had it been since she’d felt it? Weeks? Months? She wasn’t sure. She had taken it for granted, at some point, hadn’t she? At some point in her former life? Yes. She had. She remembered that clearly. It had always been there, easily available, inexhaustible, or so it seemed. Nothing changed, and everything changed, once you detached. The world didn’t change. What happened was, you’d lost your perspective, and once you detached you got it back. If you felt afraid, confused, or sad, or angry, or any other negative feelings, it didn’t take those feelings away, but once you’d said your mantra and detached, you saw that they were only feelings, and the feelings had less to do with you somehow, and you were able to acknowledge them and let them go ... because you didn’t have to feel those kinds of feelings, those negative, self-destructive feelings, those confusing, frightening, resentful feelings, and if you did ... well, that was your choice.

  Yes. It was all coming back to her now ... again. She seemed to keep losing it and finding it. Everything happened for a reason. Everything always the result of a choice. You learned it as a child, this simple axiom, as you started down the Path of Responsibility. Later, you saw it bear itself out. The schools you attended, how you did, what you studied, the clothes you wore, who you married, your sexual preferences, the corporation for which you worked, the house you lived in, the state of your health ... everything always the result of a choice. Everything happened for a reason, and if you couldn’t see the reason, that only meant that you couldn’t see it, and you probably had some detaching to do. Remove the beam that is in your eye and the speck in the other’s eye disappears. Anger is nothing but projected fear. Freedom grants us the freedom to choose but not the freedom not to choose ...

  Valentina got off her knees and stood up and shouted at the video camera that was mounted to the ceiling in the corner of the room.

  “My fingers are turning blue in here, asshole!”

  The video camera panned up with her and auto-focused on her new position. The PA beeped. A voice addressed her.

  “This is Barry. How can I help you?”

  “You can turn the fucking temperature up! I’m losing sensation in my fucking extremities!”

  Valentina was a healthcare professional, so she knew how to talk to people like Barry. The profanity, however, was unfamiliar. She didn’t know why she was talking like that.

  “Oh, my, that doesn’t sound good. I’ll see if we can’t adjust the thermostat. Oh, and your transport is being arranged. Should be just another few minutes.”

  Valentina took another deep breath and clapped and rubbed her hands together. She hopped and danced around the room to try to improve her circulation. The video camera panned and tilted, monitoring her every movement, the little red light on its housing blinking .

  “Was there anything else at the moment, Ms. Briggs?”

  There wasn’t anything else at the moment, so Barry switched off and left her alone to hop and dance around and clap, and do this kind of pursed-lip breathing thing. All of which, added to the state of her hair, which looked like maybe she had had it styled by someone with tremors who was totally blind, made her resemble a demented person, which, of course, technically, was what she was.