Taylor scanned the faces in the meeting. There was Adam, Jamie (or possibly Jaimé), Flaco, and Chino, who were ops-type people, Bethany, Sean, and Maya, the hackers, Dorian, who Taylor didn’t know what his thing was, Sarah, who stayed in the background, mostly, and appeared to be kind of an adviser to Adam (and who’d invited Taylor to this fucking meeting), Ahmed Niedermeier, who was totally paranoid, Ahmed’s girlfriend, Ingrid or something, and some tattooed punk whose name he’d forgotten.
None of these people were baby smugglers.
According to Meyer, the A.S.U. had zero to do with smuggling babies. No, the way it worked was, the baby smugglers, who were members of some other more militant outfit (some much more secretive militant outfit, the name of which Meyer did not know, or if he did, would not divulge), were there, inside the A.S.U., and were technically members of the A.S.U., but the A.S.U. didn’t know who they were, and neither did Meyer Jimenez, allegedly.
“So how do I find them?” Taylor pressed.
“Who?”
“These people ... these baby smugglers.”
This was back at 16 Mulberry. The time was approximately 0430.
“Hypothetically?”
“Sure. Whatever.”
They were sitting alone at the kitchen table, drinking rum and sweating profusely.
“A person would never find such people.”
Meyer glanced around suspiciously, or maybe just drunkenly.
“How does it work then?”
Meyer reached across for the bottle .
“Hypothetically?”
“Hypothetically.”
The stub of a candle was burning on the table. Their enormous German Impressionist shadows were looming above them on the opposite wall.
“A person would not approach such people. A person would wait to be approached by them.”
Dodo Pacheco was snoring loudly.
“Yeah ... but how will they know I’m looking for them?”
Meyer poured a shot of rum.
“They’ll know.”
“How?”
Meyer drank.
“Faith.”
“Faith?”
Meyer nodded.
“I don’t understand. Do you get word to them?”
Dodo made this apnea-related plosive sort of puffing noise.
“How?”
“You obviously know who they are.”
Dodo gasped, and went back to snoring.
“No one knows who these people are.”
“Then how do you know they even exist?”
Meyer poured another shot of rum.
“Faith.”
“Faith.”
Meyer smiled. He slid the shot glass across the table.
“Faith in what?”
“Ah ... this is the question.”
“No, Meyer ... this is not the question.”
Taylor sighed, and threw back his shot. The conversation had been going like this for close to an hour. Taylor was frustrated. Meyer, who was never a font of clarity, was being especially vague, or cagey ... or maybe it was just that he was shitfaced drunk.
“You said this cell, this …”
“Fifthian Cluster.”
“They’re in there. ”
“Who?”
“The baby smugglers.”
“Possibly.”
“But also other infiltrators.”
“Certainly.”
“Who?”
“Exactly.”
“No ... I’m asking you that.”
“Asking me what?”
“Who are the other infiltrators? Cooperators? IntraZone Waste?”
Meyer nodded.
“Security Services?”
“Everybody infiltrates everybody. Everybody uses everybody.”
Meyer reached across for the shot glass. Taylor snatched it.
“So what do I do?”
“Do about what?”
“Focus, Meyer.”
Taylor was about to blow a gasket.
“What?”
“How do I know who’s who?”
“Exactly.”
“What? Exactly what?”
“This, my friend, is what it all comes down to.”
“What is what it all comes down to?”
“Faith.”
Dodo choked, and snorted.
“In the end it all comes down to faith.”
This was back in early September, before all the stuff that was going to happen, or appear to happen, in the months that followed (which would later, almost imperceptibly, although part of Taylor would sense it happening, totally over-complicate everything, and radically change his whole take on Meyer) had happened, so Taylor was still in the dark. As far as he knew at this point in our story, things were pretty much what they were. Cassandra was pregnant. The plan was the plan. The A.S.U. was the A.S.U. The baby smugglers were baby smugglers. And Meyer Jimenez was Meyer Jimenez. Unfortunately, the way it turned out later, things were not at all what they were, or what they seemed to be at the time (as opposed to what they would seem to be later), which Taylor, of course, had no way of knowing ... which is maybe what Meyer Jimenez was saying.
Taylor, on a fairly consistent basis, had no idea what Meyer was saying ... or, OK, he got the gist of it, generally, as in he understood the meaning of the words ... but there was always something behind the words, which Taylor, when he was concentrating, and Meyer wasn’t so shitfaced drunk, thought he could sense when he heard the words ... because the words were like the shadow of it, this thing you could never express directly, which seemed to have something to do with faith, or how nothing was actually real, or true, or it was, but it was all just part and parcel of the story you were telling yourself, but you couldn’t admit you were telling yourself, and so believed that you were being told ... or whatever the fuck it was exactly Meyer was always trying to allude to.
Meyer Jimenez (who was not A.S.U., but who knew some people who knew some people who knew where some other people hung out) had been in residence at 16 Mulberry, by this time, October, for just over a year. For reasons that weren’t entirely clear, his arrival had not been announced to anyone. He seemed to have just materialized there in the kitchen one morning the previous summer. The story, it turned out, was Meyer’s father, Chaim Santobal de something Jimenez, had been active in some militant cell with Coco Freudenheim’s nephew, Maury, who along with Chaim, and a lot of other people, had disappeared during the Bain Street Riots, which had taken place down in the Southwest Sector in the run-up to the Jackson Avenue Uprising ... but the two things weren’t connected, directly. Or maybe Chaim Santobal de something had made it through the Bain Street Riots, and had slipped up out of the Southwest Sector and joined the Jackson Avenue Cell, and so had died in the Jackson Avenue Uprising, and it was Maury who had died in the Bain Street Riots, or it was one of Coco’s other nephews. All that history was kind of hazy, and mostly depended on who you talked to, which didn’t really matter, because whatever had happened, Coco Freudenheim vouched for Meyer.
A few days following his mysterious arrival, Meyer assumed the title and duties of Chef de cuisine of Apartment 2E. He specialized in Cuban dishes, pigeon paella, frijoles negro, arroz con pigeon, arroz con maiz, fried plantains, yuca, malanga, depending on what they had at the markets. Meyer never visited the markets. In fact, he never left the apartment. No, the way it worked was, Meyer stayed home, drank like a fish and manned the kitchen, and everyone else took turns with the shopping, which worked out nicely for everyone involved, as nobody else could cook worth shit. Meyer made up the shopping list, which naturally people were free to add to ... the only thing was, no fucking TŌ Food. Meyer had a thing about TŌ Food. He would not eat it and he would not cook it. What he'd do was, if you brought it to him, he’d throw it down on the floor at your feet and kick it and curse it in Yiddish and spit on it, as if it were some kind of alien organism. * To Meyer, the entire TŌ Food concept was a personal affront to his culinary prowess. It wasn’
t like he was a meat freak or anything. Meals were often vegetarian. It was just that, to Meyer, meat was meat, the flesh of some formerly living animal, a cow, a pig, or a chicken, preferably, and not some non-meat meatlike substance made out of processed soy bean curd. The only problem was, there were no cows, or pigs, or chickens, or not real ones anyway. Fortunately, there were plenty of pigeons. Pigeons weren’t always easy to catch, but people did, and they bred them in coops, which they covered with tarps and weeds and garbage to fool the BirdsEye and the roving drones. Killing pigeons, or rats, or squirrels, or any other species of sentient being, was, of course, technically, murder, and earned you an automatic Class 4, but people went ahead and did it anyway, and sold the meat to people like Meyer. **
In addition to his gastronomical activities, Meyer was something of an amateur philosopher, or a cultural theorist, or a conspiracy nut. Or at least he had all these crazy theories, which he would sit there, sweating, at the kitchen table, after he had finished whatever he was cooking, and had settled in for some serious drinking, and recount, and explain, and lecture you on, all night long if you sat there and let him. Topics ranged from the nature of time, and being, and becoming, and the perception thereof, and other such standard philosophical topics, to other not-so-standard topics, like the formerly secret, now redacted, possibly totally made-up history of the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, or the structure of the Interterritorial government, which Meyer claimed didn’t actually exist, except as a front for the corporations (which, OK, of course, he was right about that one, but everybody pretty much knew that already). If you sat there long enough, drinking with him, which Taylor, oddly, found himself doing, he’d end up shouting all this nonsense, red-faced, sweat just rolling down his cheeks, about how time did NOT equal space, no more than people’s bodies were composed of variously colored biles and humors, which Meyer insisted people had believed for hundreds of years in the Middle Ages, and medieval scientists had been able to prove (at least at the time, while people believed it), until Enlightenment scientists discovered “the truth,” that our bodies were composed of cells and enzymes, which according to Meyer was not “the truth,” or it was the “the truth,” but it was still made-up.
“At the core of every fact, my friend, is an act of faith,” he’d shout, or slur, or sometimes “nothing does not exist,” or the quote he would often end his rants with, “the will to nothing is the will to death!”
One of Meyer’s more paranoid theories concerned the accidental pregnancies among the A.S.P. 1 population. According to Meyer, these were no accidents. Meyer’s theory (which he hadn’t named yet) was that Hadley and the other corporations were using the female 1s as livestock, sabotaging their Anti-Baby pills, their MorningAfter pills, and even the condoms. These “accidentally” pregnant women (who’d been selected by the corporations, who of course had access to their MedBase files), had been rendered to secure facilities, their babies harvested, psychologically conditioned (or raised) in some corporate training compound, and finally, once they had come of age, put into service as Security Specialists. The mothers had probably been killed and cremated, as once their babies had been safely harvested, there’d be no reason to keep them alive. Meyer suspected the corporations were breeding battalions of these brainwashed soldiers, who they sent out into the Recovering Areas to exterminate any faith-based Terrorists living in the ruins of the blasted cities, and in caves, and in fortified underground camps ... all of which sounded a bit far-fetched, if not just batshit crazy, to Taylor.
Meyer had a million of these theories, some of which actually made some sense. One of Taylor’s particular favorites was the one about how the corporations were not really being run by the Normals, but were more or less running themselves at this point, operating like autonomous programs according to some systemic logic that the Normals, being part and parcel of, had lost the ability to even perceive. According to this theory (which Meyer called “The Fascist Decentralization of Everything”), the minds of the Normals were all controlled by this a priori perceptual paradigm that determined the parameters in which they could think, and even the questions they were capable of asking. This paradigm (which Meyer explained to Taylor was like the unconscious model, or matrix, in relation to which one interpreted everything) was not an ideology, or creed, which one could at least define and critique, but rather, was the unarticulated boundary establishing the limits of one’s imaginative powers, and interpretative powers, and thus perception itself. Taylor couldn’t follow that completely, but he thought he got the general idea, how what the Normals thought of as just “common sense,” or obvious facts, or “the way things are,” was as much a product of mental conditioning, or brainwashing, as anything else they believed, and that sounded more or less right to Taylor.
Another one of Taylor’s favorites, which was also one of Meyer’s favorites, was one called The Pathologization of Everything, which had something to do with the corporations replacing morality, and ethics in toto, with a much more effective and insidious means of controlling the Normals’ thoughts and behavior. Here, according to Meyer at least, was the ultimate Corporatist tour de force ... the eradication of any surviving remnants of anti- or non-market values, along with the co-optation thereof by the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. According to Meyer, the way this worked was, whenever they (i.e., the corporations) wanted to control or entirely eliminate some specific behavior or way of thinking, they didn’t have to bother convincing people (as earlier, more despotic regimes had) that whatever it was was “bad” or “wrong” ... they simply invented some new disorder, or syndrome, or some other pseudo-illness, with a new set of symptoms that matched that behavior (or emotion, or undesirable way of thinking), and added it to the DSM. Then they sent out the appropriate press releases and let the media do their thing.
Being a Class 3 Anti-Social Person, this wasn’t exactly news to Taylor, *** however, there was this one little part of Meyer’s theory that he found intriguing, and had sat around drinking and discussing with Meyer until they both passed out on numerous occasions. This was the part that was gnawing at him now (as he sat there in that airless basement while the hardcore members of the Fifthian Cluster exhaustively discussed “security culture”). According to this part of Meyer’s theory, despite the Pathologization of Everything, the Normals, or at least the Variant-Positives, the products of nearly three thousand years of psychological and behavioral conditioning, even then, in the 27th Century, continued to perceive the world and people, not in medical or pathological terms (which is what you’d expect, given this theory), but in moralistic terms ... like “right” and “wrong.” They didn’t use these words of course. They used other words, like “healthy” and “unhealthy,” and “positive” and “negative,” and “balanced” and “imbalanced,” but what they meant was right and wrong. If you asked them to explain these terms, and what they were based on, they couldn’t, not really. They’d tell you it was something they just felt in their hearts, and knew intuitively, and was probably innate, something to do with fairness and kindness and treating others as one wanted to be treated. Of course, they had never been able to do this, and instead had killed and butchered and tortured and enslaved each other throughout human history, but that was on account of original sin, or the fact that carnate life was suffering, or it was some kind of test that God was conducting, or something ... there was always some tortuous logic that explained why humans were tragic miscreants, and why “good” and “bad” and “right” and “wrong” were not just concepts, like other concepts, but were a priori transcendent truths, which no sane person could every question.
The origin of all this moralistic thinking, according to Meyer (and Taylor concurred), was nothing transcendent or in any way spiritual. It was simply fear. Primordial fear ... fear of being killed and eaten. Apparently, once, a long, long time ago, the earth had been host to a variety of species, many of them larger and rather more frightening than the rats, pigeons, mutant insec
ts, and other forms of unattractive fauna indigenous to the United Territories. **** Tigers, for example, or those really big sharks, man-eating lizards, snakes, crocodiles, bears, wolves, panthers, jackals, vicious apes, enormous weasels, and snorting, slavering pig-like creatures with mouths full of horrible grinding molars ... which, the point is, if you came across them, odds were you’d be killed and eaten. Human beings had lived like this for thousands, possibly millions of years, scurrying about like terrified monkeys, stuffing their faces with nuts and berries, dashing in and out of caves, and so on, trying to not to be killed and eaten. Then, according to Meyer’s theory, something truly astonishing happened. Sometime during the Paleolithic Period, for reasons Meyer had never explained (at least not to Taylor, as far as he remembered), people got tired of being killed and eaten, and of living in constant white-eyed terror of being killed, and dismembered, and eaten. So what they did was, they banded into groups, groups of ten to maybe twenty individuals, which reduced the odds of being killed and eaten ... reduced, but unfortunately did not eliminate, the odds of being killed and eaten. However, they were on the right course now. So what they did next was, they enlarged these groups, these so-called “bands” of up to twenty individuals (whose structure was based on filial ties and was typically informal and egalitarian), forming “tribes” of hundreds of individuals, who were still pretty squirrely and not very disciplined. So all right, good, they were making progress. However, at this stage, they encountered a problem. Due to the growing size of these tribes, and the frequent disagreements among their members (disagreements which were typically resolved by bashing each other’s skulls in with rocks), intra-tribal societal discipline became a necessity, or at least an advantage, and means were soon sought to establish same. Warrior chiefs, with the aid of their shamans, rose to prominence and established this discipline, and codes of acceptable tribal behavior, and subjugation and allegiance to their tribes. Members of such tribes were called “the people,” which (a) probably sounded nice, and (b) served to distinguish these members from the members of other disagreeable tribes, who lived across the river somewhere, and were not “the people,” and were strange and frightening, and eaters of filth, who worshiped demons.
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