by Alex Shakar
In two minutes, the basket was empty and Manny looked up.
“Swallow the mu, Fred. Become mu. Figure it out, OK?”
“How?” Fred could barely mouth the question.
Manny took in a deep breath, fixed Fred with a fiery stare, and pursing his lips, whispered in a long exhalation:
“Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.”
As Manfred blew, around him, Fred could see the unearthly glare coming back, lighting up the margarita tank, the party lights, the saltrimmed glasses, the laughing, flirting, gabbing crowd—all of it already gone, here forever, both at once.
“Do it,” Manny said.
Fred blinked. The glare had vanished.
“Go ahead,” Manny coaxed.
“Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu,” Fred whispered.
“Yeah. That’s it. Just keep doing that inside your head.”
“For how long?”
Manny considered. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how long it takes. Will you do that?”
Fred considered. “I doubt it.” He could dive into the margarita mixer, he thought, be whirled to a pulp.
“They have a saying. If there is doubt, doubt hard.”
“Doubt hard?”
Manny nodded, eyes electric again. “Doubt coming and doubt going. Only when the Ball of Doubt has been smashed”—he slammed his palm down, sending Fred’s drink sloshing once more—“can Great Faith arise!”
Trying to wake up, as usual, he’s just wound up in some dream city. Done on the cheap. No streetlights, no people, its tallest spires no taller than him. He can barely walk on these darkened, spongy streets, every step a potential fall involving a series of lurches and counterlurches. He can’t even stand properly; even the plazas are crazily banked. His club, each time he raises it to swing, throws him off balance. And these two shabby towers in front of him—the powers that be aren’t even bothering to keep this dreamworld up to date.
No matter, he’s doing it for them, winding up and releasing, again, again, again, smashing the pair to pieces.
Fred awoke to the sound of a door catching on a deadbolt. The maid, checking to see if he was out yet. He was beyond nauseated. He would have paid to be properly nauseated, instead of what he was—it felt like he’d been turned inside out, like all of his skin were on the inside simmering in stomach acid and all his nerves and bones were scraping against the sheets. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten back here. The last thing he could remember—aside from that awful dream—was wasting away with Manfred in Margaritaville. Fred had never had a memory lapse from drinking before. Maybe he’d never been quite that drunk. The gap was scary to contemplate; though, on the other hand, here he was, on the verge of retching but otherwise all right. The clock by the bed read 2:04—PM, judging from the daylight around the curtains. The police hadn’t come about the helmet and the picture. At least, he couldn’t remember them having come. To make sure, he sat up, waited for the room to gyroscope into place, and squinted over at the corner. The helmet sat on the desk. The picture of Gretta and the Bush brothers leaned up against it. He was about to look away, satisfied, when something shiny resting by the base of the picture caught his eye.
A golf club.
He lay there, not daring to move.
Uh-oh, said Inner George.
He couldn’t have. Who would have let him? Or had he snuck in? Could he remember a fence? Climbing it? He thought he could remember a fence, maybe, lumbering alongside it, the streaks of passing headlights. Those narrow, green runways lurching beneath his feet. He kept sifting through the tatters, hoping for something that would prove it a dream, but the more he thought about it, the more real it got: Staring down those replica Twin Towers. The rubberized handle in his grip, vibrating as the club cracked their fiberglass hulls and crunched their plaster interiors. The plumes of dust erupting with every strike. The utter hatred he’d felt for the hollow, hokey things. The utter joy at bringing them down.
Now, though, the thought of the desecration nearly made him vomit. He pictured his face up on wanted posters next to bearded Al Qaeda operatives. He looked again, hoping that when he’d seen the club before he’d still been dreaming.
There it was.
What was he supposed to do now? His cell phone wasn’t flashing, but he checked it for messages just in case, almost hoping for one, despite the fact that at this point there couldn’t be any news but bad. In any event, there were none.
Maybe Armation was planning to let the theft go, he thought. Or maybe no one had seen him removing the items from the premises. It was possible no one had seen him smashing up the miniature golf course, either. For all he knew, he’d gotten away with the whole sorry crime spree. He tried to derive some hope from the possibility. But the golf club, the space helmet, and the stares from the three grinning white men beside it unnerved him entirely. What should he do with those things? He thought about leaving them here in the room when he left, or tossing them all from his rental minivan over a theme park wall. He could do it with the golf club, maybe, but as for the other items, it seemed more prudent to hold onto them. At least have the option of returning them if need be.
The hot void in his stomach was already beginning to signal hunger as well as general revolt. With no money for food, the only thing to do was head straight for the airport. He’d missed his flight, but could probably get a standby. He stood under the shower for a minute, clambered back into some clothing, then tried to figure out how to pack everything. He ended up sticking the golf club into his carry-on and wrapping the handle that stuck out through the zipper in the leather jacket Manny had given him, which he turned inside out to reduce the chances of the hotel staff recognizing it from their lost and found. As for the space helmet and the picture, he wrapped them as best he could in his Barneys jacket, stuck them under his arm, and grabbed his briefcase.
No one paid much attention to him, he was pretty sure, on the way out of the hotel. He loaded it all into the minivan. From the parking lot, he steered in the direction Manny had gone last night, up the street, past the golf course. He made out only bright yellow police tape and a handful of onlookers, before his foot stomped the gas.
A few blocks down, he pulled into a convenience store lot and leaned his head against the wheel, opening the windows to dilute the atomized marshmallow blasting straight into his forebrain. He finally recognized the car-freshener scent. It was Lucky Charms, the breakfast cereal. With the realization came a sliver of a memory of some otherwise lost, overcast morning, of him and George and Sam munching those stalesweet trinkets and the surrounding salty-sweet gold bullion, gazing at the bright red box with its heel-clicking leprechaun scattering magic sparkles with a spoon. The smell now made him as hungry as it did nauseated. Every thirty seconds or so, the sound of rattling roller-coaster cars and group screams shook the otherwise cadaverous calm of the day. He didn’t blame all those park employees on Xanax in the slightest.
Letting his eyes shut, he was soon recalling a night toward the end of high school, when George had joined Fred and a group of Fred’s dark-clad, asymmetrical-haircutted friends on a subway trip out to Coney Island. The rides were closing down just as they got there, and they watched the groaning behemoths come to a stop one by one, paying special attention to the dinosaurs already extinct—the Parachute Jump, the Thunderbolt. They wandered out to the trash-strewn beach, sprawled on the cool sand, and watched the lights go out from a distance. A soulful, black-lipsticked girl Fred liked named Nadja found a hypodermic needle in a clump of seaweed, and they all dared each other to jump in the water. They passed around a bottle of schnapps and talked about the coming apocalypse—one of Fred’s favorite subjects at the time—whether it would be from war or environmental collapse or science gone wrong or the lunatic fringe. He was just getting started on how it could be all the above, when George, who hadn’t said much until then, stood up among them, in his bright yellow thrift-store dress shirt and businessman slacks, and kicked off
his shoes.
“You’re all a bunch of drips,” George said, peeling off his socks. No one there really knew him too well. They knew him only as Fred’s straightarrow brother, the studious one, the computer geek. They hadn’t seen him like this, Fred thought.
“This is going to be our world. Ours to remake.” George opened his arms. “Look around you. Think of what we could do with all this.”
They all sat there, looking. At the dim bones of the ancient rides. At the looming shadows of the public housing complex.
George charged into the waves, whooping. Eventually, they all followed. The closest Fred and George ever came, or ever wanted to come, to “sharing a chick,” as the smirking Armation CEO had put it, was when the two of them ran carrying a big, laughing, screaming goth girl named Trace—a clove cigarette still smoking in her fingers—and plunged, with her and all her black organza, into the bright black water.
After weaving his way out of the amusement park ghetto, Fred pulled behind a Publix supermarket, salvaged a stained cantaloupe box big enough for the helmet and the picture, and deposited, in a dumpster full of rotting fruit, the incriminating golf club.
At the airport, he borrowed some tape from the car rental agent, sealed up the box, and checked it at the counter. His skull rang and pulsed, his stomach yowled. Passing a concession stand, he patted his pocket, and thought he might have enough change for a candy bar, preservatives and carcinogens be damned. But reaching for the coins, all he brought up was a handful of round, plastic buttons—numbered 1 through 5. On the inescapable televisions, George Bush told the people of the concourse they were in the battle of their lives, insurgent snipers boasted of killing thirty-one GIs, box-office sales indicated the moviegoing public was in no mood for Mission: Impossible III, and an Ohio teenager was walking six hundred and fifty miles to New York to raise money for the 9/11 memorial. The endless tributes were starting to seem more monstrous to Fred than the attacks themselves. Sitting down and shutting his eyes, he could still see the silver blur of the golf club, hear the crunch, see the dust plumes from the midget towers. He tried to feel shame, but the memory itself was too pleasurable, and he just ended up reliving that muscle-deep satisfaction of the swings and the hits.
An hour later, he was airborne, his temple to the window, gazing down at the urban grids, the industrial parks, the theme parks, the lonejet fountains, the worming, sprouting cul-de-sacs of subdivisions—a pell-mell metastasis stopped only by the ocean. That a few fanatics had flown airplanes down into all of that seemed less surprising to him than that legions more hadn’t yet done the same. Half the world or more was already setting itself against all the complexity in one way or another, going off to live in caves or gated communities, dreaming of a world with one god, one book, a world small enough to feel that one wasn’t lost in it.
This is the Pure Land, his crazy godfather had said, arms wide, camera in hand.
Penetrate the mu.
For the duration of the flight, Fred tried, imagining the sound with every outbreath:
Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu …
There were moments when he’d feel like he was on the trail of something, an openness, a sense of possibility, moments when he felt like that light might return, like that faith without ignorance might be just around the corner, like the world could be anything and he could be anything in it. But no sooner had he begun to hope than he was plunged back into his grim particulars:
Mu but that bastard Gretta.
Mu but George, tubes in his nose, staring at his living room wall. Trying to exterminate himself with some similar mantra before the universe did it for him. George might as well have been slouched in a tub, watching the blood waft from his veins.
Mu but Sam, so evasive on the phone the other day. He must have known something, Fred thought, must have had something to do with Fred’s getting shipped off to human resources. No other explanation made sense. No one at Armation cared about Fred enough to be vindictive, to go to the trouble of sticking him somewhere other than in his old outfit. And Sam still hadn’t called or emailed. He must have conspired with Armation to stay in control, or whatever illusion of control of the brothers’ former company he now imagined he possessed.
Told you we should have fired him early on, Inner George said.
What Fred couldn’t figure out was why Sam had even bothered asking him to come back aboard, why the sneaky shit had sent him to Florida at all.
Was Sam in on those prank messages to boot?
Was it all a plot to drive Fred mad?
From LaGuardia, Fred took the bus to the subway, spending two of the remaining six dollars of his net worth that were digitally encoded in his transit card, thinking about Sam the whole way, ever more convinced that his little brother was behind what had happened to him, and ever more enraged. The office, when Fred arrived, was in disarray. A hedge maze of boxes, empty and full, covered the floor. The most recent of the manuals and software packages had been cleared from the shelves, the impoverished, gap-toothed remainder awaiting the inevitable arm to come sweeping them into the trash. A few of the desks were still manned by a nighttime skeleton crew, three fuzzy heads bobbing to myriad headphone rhythms, fingers pecking code—while others had been stripped of their computers, coffee mugs, lamps, and DVD dispensers. The only vestiges of Conrad and Jesse were a pair of crazy-eyes-onsprings glasses with one eye missing on Conrad’s desk, and the bumper sticker on the wall over Jesse’s—WHEN SWORDS ARE ILLEGAL, ONLY ORCS WILL HAVE SWORDS—a rip in one corner suggesting that Jesse had tried without success to take this with him, too. On a patch of wall where a bookshelf had been, a scuffed Matrix poster with Keanu Reeves looking badass in a leather overcoat hung exposed for the first time in years. In the microwave, a plastic bowl rotated in a forlorn orbit around nothing. A pillow and Sam’s old army blanket lay rumpled over the couch’s plush cushions like a fallen soldier. Whether from the coming confrontation or this final visual evidence of his company’s disintegration, panic twined around the anger in Fred’s gut, a double helix of doom.
The microwave beeped and the light went off. As no one else even looked in the machine’s direction, Fred used it as an excuse to force himself into the room, setting his carry-on and briefcase and box of Armation loot inside the door. Peering through the little window, he found that the bowl contained minestrone soup. The coil inside him strained like its ends had been pulled. Not sure exactly what he’d do with it yet, or if he could even control what he’d do with it, he took the steaming bowl by the rim with the fingers of both hands. The tomato-broth fumes made him swoon with hunger as he ferried it, weaving around the desks and boxes, past the still moronically humming Prayerizer with its moronically whirring floor fan, and into Sam’s alcove.
He found Sam where Sam always was, in his Aeron, headphoned head cocked toward his right monitor, on which, in an Urth window, dressed in a dark-blue business suit, Sam’s avatar stood against a gray background, tapping a foot. As Fred watched, there was a jump cut, and Little Sam was now hunched, his mouth open, his tongue visible, a hand clutching his stomach. A few seconds later, irregular patches of baldness appeared in his scalp. Next, the skin of his face and neck were suddenly grayish and bruised. Next, a shiny line of blood appeared between the corner of his mouth and the side of his chin. Fred noticed a digital time counter in a lower corner of the frame, flickering through hours and days. When the day counter hit seven, the hunched-over avatar was replaced by a version on its back on the ground, unmistakably a corpse, with a widely ajar mouth and purplish, sealed eyelids. Fred felt a queasy undertow.
“Radiation poisoning.”
Sam’s voice startled him. The soup in his hands almost spilled. A cyclopean blend of Sam’s eyes stared at him from the lamp head’s curvature.
“Works on its own,” Sam said, his tight jaw belying the careful casualness of his tone, “but whenever I try to plug it into Urth, it goes buggy. The whole place is going buggy. It’s like with the move, the code’s getting all
jumbled up in transit.”
Fred thought of the last message, the hints of a rebellion against Armation. Were these bugs more sabotage, then? Or did Sam only want him to think so?
“Let’s take a walk.” Fred kept his voice low, barely a whisper.
“A walk.” Sam made the word sound like some affected foreign expression no true patriot would ever have used.
“Come on,” Fred muttered between his teeth.
“Where is it you want to walk to? Haven’t your feet covered every square inch of this city by now?”
Fred’s pulse pounded in his ears. It was too hot in here. Another minute and he might throw up the ounce or two of acid and bile coating the bottom of his stomach. “I’m trying to be considerate,” he said, though this wasn’t true. “But if you’d rather have it out in front of them,” he jerked his head back toward the employees, “I certainly don’t give a shit anymore.”
“Have what out?”
“What the fuck, Sam? That fucking meeting, if you want to call it that. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Sam straightened his back, then finally turned in his seat to face him. “Fred, is that bowl of soup in your hand a good-will token, or a weapon?”
I think it’s a hat, Inner George said.
“We’ll see,” Fred said.
“If I agree to that walk, will you set it down gently on the desk?”
The urge to weaponize the minestrone was close to irresistible now, but Fred managed to put it down. Meanwhile, the sequence of Little Sam’s irradiated death began playing itself out again. Sam opened a drawer filled with plastic utensils, took out a spoon and a napkin, dropped the spoon into the bowl, placed the napkin on his palm and the bowl on the napkin. Then got up and, without looking at Fred, led him back through the office, out into the hall, and down the stairs. To Fred’s confusion, Sam didn’t stop at the ground floor, instead opening a fire door and descending into the basement.