In the world outside of Taylor’s head (also known as physical reality), the storm had brought the daytime temperature down to a pleasant 31 Celsius. Anti-Socials were out in the streets, playing in puddles the size of lakes, or just standing around in the pouring rain laughing like packs of demented children. Columns of towering cumulonimbi were crawling westward across the horizon, obscuring the sun and sky and everything. Chutes of rain were cascading down off the lips of the buckling roofs of tenements. Anti-Socials were standing under them, sewer water up to their ankles. It looked like an outdoor aquatic theme-park in some medium-security section of Hell.
Taylor, thoroughly soaked to the bone, sploshed his way through the throngs of revelers. He was heading for the former library, or archive, or bookstore, or whatever the fuck it was, where the hardcore members of the Fifthian Cluster gathered in secret every Monday morning. He’d left Cassandra with explicit instructions to keep her piece of shit pirate Viewer turned up as loud as reasonably possible to drown out Max, if he started crying, which being a baby, he was likely to do, and additionally, under zero circumstances, to open her bedroom door for anyone. He didn’t feel it necessary, currently, to share his intention to kill all her roommates. He figured she probably had enough to deal with, given the ordeal she had just been through ... and now with the nursing, and crying, and burping, and terror of being disappeared, and so on. He told her, promised her, swore up and down, got on his knees and begged her to believe, that everything was going to be OK, and that all they needed was twenty-four hours, because as soon as Sarah learned that Max (and yes, he’d named the baby Max ... he wasn’t entirely sure when he’d done that), that Max had been born, prematurely, she would contact her network of baby smugglers, who would put the “action” into motion, the details of which would go like clockwork ... after which, once little Max was gone, and on his way to the Autonomous Zones, and Cassandra safe (and her roommates dead), everything was going to be OK.
Cassandra had sat there, Max on her tit, doing his impression of the cutest, sweetest, most adorable baby that had ever been born, listening to Taylor desperately trying to keep her from suffocating the kid with a pillow more or less the second he went out the window. Nothing was going to be OK. Everything was going to be not OK. Everything was going to be totally fucked, until they got rid of the fucking baby. And not in like twenty-four hours either ... like now, before it started crying again, and got them both disappeared, and killed, was the basic thrust of Cassandra’s input.
Now this is a rather delicate point, so please don’t get the wrong idea. Cassandra, despite her Greek-sounding name, was not some sort of baby-murdering psycho freak that had no feelings. Cassandra had a wealth of feelings, an abundance of feelings, a surplus of feelings. Basically, Cassandra had too many feelings. Her heart, her loins, her swollen breasts, every last cell in her voluptuous body, was dancing to the same hormonal tune that plays in the post-parturitional brain of all post-parturitional women, commanding them to feed and protect their babies. She wanted to feed and protect her baby. And she was. She was lying there nursing her baby. She was stroking his head. His hair was beautiful. Her baby was beautiful. She loved her baby. At the same time, she did not want to die. She wasn’t at all confused about this. She did not want to cease to exist, to never, not for one moment, ever, in the course of all time and all timeless eternity, be, feel, know, remember ... because, now, see, for Cassandra Passwaters, death was no longer just an abstract concept (i.e., an inconceivable absence of everything, or erasure of everything, which we all know is coming ... someday, yes ... but never today). Death, for Cassandra, was not at all abstract, or remote, or in any way theoretical. Death was out there right fucking now, right out there in the fucking hallway, waiting for one of her annoying roommates to report the sounds of a crying infant ... which OK, it wasn’t crying currently (it was gumming her nipple like a moray eel), but it would be soon enough, she predicted, at which point, blammo ... eternal nothing, followed by more eternal nothing. So there she was, pulled, as it were, this way by her maternal instincts, and that way by her survival instincts ... and so far her survival instincts were winning.
Taylor did not judge her for that. He had his own survival instincts. He just didn’t want to her to suffocate the baby. He wanted to fix this. He believed he could.
He bounded up the spiral stairs of the former library, or archive, or whatever (where someone would know how to contact Sarah), pushed through the secret door in the wall, and into the secret room in the attic ... where absolutely no one was. The milk crates and metal folding chairs the Fifthian Cluster used for meetings, and to sit around in semi-circles and talk a lot of militant crap all day, were strewn about the floor haphazardly. One of the dormer windows was broken. Rain was blowing in sideways through it. Either the Cluster had fled in a hurry, or the place had been raided, or, well, something had happened.
He ran back down the spiral staircase, out into the torrential rain, three blocks south, to Eckards Place, up another two flights of stairs, and into this loft-like warehouse space where the Fifthian Cluster normally ran their “Intro to Basic Vandalism” workshops. Two or more of the hardcore members of the Fifthian Cluster were always up there, guarding the stolen cans of spray paint and the plastic jugs of hydrofluoric acid, and other such highly corrosive chemicals, and the tools, and hardware, and other equipment ... not today, though. No one was up there. Moreover, the workshop had been dismantled. The makeshift cookers, the beakers, burners, every last piece of equipment was gone. The racks where the paint went were standing there empty. Cabinet doors were hanging open. Nails, screws, wing nuts, washers, and various other shrapnel-type items were scattered like seeds on the paint-spattered floor.
Taylor ran, trudged, and waded through the flooded streets in the pissing down rain from meeting location to covert workshop to daytime safehouse to underground depot ... every place he checked was the same. And these weren’t just Fifthian Cluster places. He checked the hangouts of virtually every cell of the A.S.U. he knew ... ZF2, the B/O3, he even checked the bar on Bond Street where the Bond Street Bombers always hung out. Could IntraZone Waste & Security Services have taken down all these cells at once? No, he reasoned, because if they had, someone would’ve have seen something somewhere. Taylor, in the course of his soggy reconnaissance, had interviewed all the usual thugs, dealers, thieves, whores, and dope fiends that hung out anywhere near the proximity of the places someone should have been, but no one was, and the word on that was, no one had seen anything, anywhere. Which made no sense. None whatsoever. How could the entire Anti-Social Underground vanish into thin fucking air? Not that Taylor gave a shit about the fate of the Anti-Social Underground ... but how was he going to locate Sarah and get her to set the plan in motion?
At approximately who knew fucking when, sometime later that afternoon, he bolted up the stairs of 16 Mulberry, his combat boots going squish squish squish as he took each flight in three or four steps, dripping water down the stairs behind him. He was on his way up to talk to Meyer, who was pretty much Taylor’s last hope at this point. On the second floor landing some total wino was standing there, not a care in the world, pissing intently down into the corner, as if there were maybe a big “pissoir” sign with an arrow pointing into the building out front. Taylor, perhaps a wee bit on edge, grabbed the wino by the back of the head and slammed his face through the airshaft window, precipitating multiple facial lacerations, and scaring the bejesus out of the pigeons that were weathering the storm out there on the ledge. The wino collapsed into his puddle of pee, groped at his face, and shrieked incoherently ... but by that time Taylor was up the stairs .
Meyer Jimenez was asleep in bed, which was weird, because Meyer was never in bed. There he was, though, lying there, snoring, his bottle of rum on the floor there beside him. Taylor took hold of the crinkled lapels of his seersucker suit and sat him up. Bleary, Meyer blinked, moaned, muttered something having to do with Taylor fucking his mother in Spanish, and fell back
asleep in a sitting position. Taylor went ahead and slapped the living shit out of Meyer several times, explaining how he needed him to wake up and focus before Taylor ripped his balls off, and so on. Meyer, appearing much more alert now, inquired as to what Taylor’s fucking problem was. Taylor told him, stressing the part where he needed to locate Sarah, or Adam, or any other member of the A.S.U., which Meyer needed to help him accomplish if he wanted to continue to be able to walk. Meyer listened, nodding, belching and saying “mmm” at the appropriate places. He said only had one question.
“Who are these people, this Adam and Sarah?”
Taylor, slapping Meyer’s head from side to side to side repeatedly, which made him look like someone watching a tennis match being played on amphetamines, explained how he, at the present time, was the last person Meyer wanted to fuck with. He reminded Meyer that he was not a moron, and that he had known all along, from the very beginning, that Meyer was somehow in cahoots with Sarah, and was probably some kind of faith-based Terrorist, which he didn’t give a shit as far as that went, but he needed to be able to reach her ... now, which Meyer was going to assist him with, or experience extensive internal bleeding. Meyer, after he finished vomiting and soiling himself and begging, and so on, swore on his life that he was telling the truth, that he had no idea who this Sarah was, or where she was, or who she was with, or whether the A.S.U. had been raided, or what he had ever done to Taylor to make Taylor want to abuse him like this. Taylor looked around for something metal to crush the bones in Meyer’s hands with, but the room was mostly just full of old books ...
“Leave him alone,” Coco said.
Coco Freudenheim was standing in the doorway glaring at Taylor with her hair on sideways. Dexter was riding shotgun beside her. His spine was arched, his pupils dilated. “What is wrong with you? Look at the man. Can’t you see he doesn’t know anything? ”
She shoved Taylor out of her way. He let her. Nobody fucked with Coco Freudenheim.
“Don’t just stand there,” Coco ordered, helping Meyer back onto his bed, “go get a washcloth.”
Taylor just stood there.
“Go already.”
Taylor went.
Where did Taylor go exactly? He went out and walked around in the rain. He wasn’t going anywhere, exactly. He just needed to think, and walk, and think, and figure this out. Which he could not do. His head kept asking variations of the same set of questions, which he could not answer. Like where was the fucking A.S.U.? And was it possible they all been raided? All at once? No, it wasn’t. Had they gone into hiding? Why would they do that? Where would they do that? Where would they go? Technically, they were already in hiding. Were they down in some underground bunker somewhere, a staging area with a cache of weapons? Was this the D.A.D.A.? No. It wasn’t. No one was rising up against anything. People were walking around in the rain, playing in puddles and laughing and drinking. And they hadn’t even consensually decided on a date yet ... or at least not as far as Taylor knew. But then what did Taylor really know? What did he really know about anything? About Sarah? Or Adam? Or any of these people? He knew what they’d told him. And what he’d seen, or thought he’d seen, which could have all been bullshit. What if Meyer was telling the truth, and he didn’t know what was happening either? Taylor had never mentioned Sarah, or Adam, or not by name, to Meyer. What if Meyer really didn’t know them? What was it Meyer had said that night, back in October, when this whole thing started?
Everybody infiltrates everybody. Everybody uses everybody.
And Sarah, with her ominous allusions to the future, or the lack thereof ... what was that? Did she know this was coming, whatever this was? He reached in his pocket and felt for the pass ... which was not there. No ... that’s right. He had stashed the Travel Pass deep in his backpack, along with some other travel-type items, including a homemade pacifier, a squishy little rubber sack with holes that you could stuff full of fruit that Max could chew on. When had he done that? Why had he done that? He wasn’t going anywhere without Cassandra ... so what was he packing his backpack for? And where was Sarah, who had sworn she would know when Cassandra delivered, which Cassandra had, and was waiting back there on Jefferson Avenue with Max on her tit, freaking out? So where the fuck was she and her faith-based comrades, assuming she hadn’t just made them up (because nothing was really real or whatever), and that they weren’t just a bunch of Corporatist agents running some sort of complicated sting?
And on and on with the fucking questions, and scenarios he could not make sense of ... and Christ he was tired of even trying, which he had given up doing decades ago, trying to make sense of fucking anything, which they would never let you do completely (he wasn’t quite sure who he meant by “they” ... the corporations and the Normals, sure, but there was also some sort of cosmic “they”), because every time you thought you had, or had started to, anyway, to make sense of anything, or begin to grasp what was really happening, as in who was really doing what to who, or running whatever game on someone for reasons you could never begin to understand, or was filling your head with some made-up nonsense that was actually only meant to distract you from what they were or weren’t doing ... every time you thought you had maybe halfway started to figure that out, it turned out you were just being played, manipulated, or just flat out lied to, and the truth was, you didn’t have a clue what was happening ... and probably no one, anywhere, did.
Taylor sloshed around through the puddles, the rain beating mercilessly down on his head, asking the same unanswerable questions over and over and over and over, and occasionally stopping in the middle of the street and staring up into the Asshole of Doom. He had wandered south, for no conscious reason, away from Cassandra and Max and everything (and what it was gradually dawning on him he was probably going to have to do), and was crossing Wallace Lefferts Avenue and about to walk past Muybridge Lane, when he realized the one place he hadn’t checked, it being the middle of the day and all, was back where this whole fiasco had started ... which given the circuitous nature of everything was where he’d been heading all along, apparently .
He turned and walked down Muybridge Lane, cursing God and life and Sarah, veered off into the secret alley and went through the tunnel that led to the alley that no one knew how you got there otherwise ... and there it was, the Pussyhorse Lounge.
A nondescript work-van was parked out front. The pull-down metal gate was up. Someone was in there. Security? Possibly. He stood there across the alley, watching, running the scenarios in his head. He had to be extremely careful, because one wrong step and it would be all over and ... fuck it, he thought. He crossed the alley. The door was unlocked. He walked right in.
Eoghan was clearly surprised to see him, as was his enormous ugly friend, who was helping him pack the last few bottles of booze, beer mugs, and other accoutrements into a collection of Transplant bags, duffels, and taped-up cardboard boxes that were stacked up against the front of the bar and were obviously meant to go into the van. The two of them turned and stared at Taylor, and not in an overly amicable way. Another fairly mean-looking fellow was sitting in the booth where Taylor had sat with Adam and Sarah that night in October. Taylor had him in the peeling old mirror mounted on the wall behind the bar. He had never seen either of these guys in his life.
“The fuck you doing here?” Eoghan asked him.
“Looking for Sarah,” Taylor said.
“Sarah who?” Mister Ugly asked. “He don’t know who the fuck that is.”
Mister Ugly was coming around from behind the bar. He was doing it slowly, as if he was going to sneak up on Taylor, who was standing right there in front of him, watching.
Taylor had never understood that move.
“What’s going on?” Taylor asked Eoghan.
“The fuck’s it look like?” Mister Ugly answered.
“Did we get raided or what?” Taylor pressed on.
“We? Who is we, motherfucker?”
Eoghan glanced below the bar. The mean-looking du
de in the booth was just sitting there. A chair stood right-side up on a table to Taylor’s right. The door was open.
“Why don’t you just get the fuck out of here?” Eoghan wondered.
Taylor didn’t move .
“I need to find Sarah,” he reiterated.
Mister Ugly was coming toward him.
“She’s gone. Everyone’s gone,” Eoghan said.
Four steps away, three, two. Mister Ugly was the talkative sort.
“Listen asshole, whatever the fuck you …”
Taylor grabbed and swung the chair ... fracturing most of Mister Ugly’s left molars, and his jaw, and the socket of the guy’s left eye. He let the follow-through take him around, reversed, and lobbed the chair at Eoghan. Eoghan ducked. The chair sailed past him ... into the mirror behind the bar. Shards of glass rained down onto Eoghan, who had just been hit in the head by the chair, and on top of whom Taylor, who had vaulted the bar, landed, savagely, with both his boots. The mean-looking guy who’d been sitting in the booth was up now and, wisely, had his knife out. He was holding it backwards (in Taylor’s opinion) and moving all Kung Fu and shit. Taylor didn’t like the look of this asshole, nor was he in the mood to fuck around here. He groped around under the lip of the bar, where Eoghan had glanced, and found the zip-gun. Taylor had never trusted zips. They generally misfired and blew off your fingers. This one, however, looked pretty decent. Heavy tubing. Solid chamber. He raised it, aimed, snapped the band, and shot Mister Kung Fu below the left eye.
Taylor stood behind the bar, his boot jammed down on Eoghan’s neck, and watched as the guy kind of waltzed around, groping blindly for something to sit on. He found a chair, eased himself into it, and sat there, blinking, looking confused. A dribble of blood leaked out of the tiny .18 caliber hole in his cheek. He yawned, or tried to breathe through his mouth. Blood trickled down out of both of his nostrils. He didn’t appear to understand what was happening.
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