by Greg Chivers
OK, game-time. This is my shot. ‘Do you think he’d feel differently if he had two mil in, say … six hours’ time?’
A low whistle sighs through the old man’s lips. ‘That’s too big for you, Levi Peres. You should not be messing with that kind of money.’
‘Why do you think I’m talking to you, Leo?’ He nods at that. Gangsters are people, same as everyone else. They like to feel important. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. I’m gonna find out pretty quick if I’m wrong.
‘OK, Levi. I’m gonna go talk to Shant upstairs. Maybe that takes five minutes. Maybe you’re not here when he comes down. If you are, I’m not responsible for what happens.’
I’m sitting on the same red faux-leather bench in the same booth I was last week, waiting for the same guy, only this time I figure he wants to kill me. I was excited then; I thought I was moving up in the world. Yeah, well, like my grammy used to say: ‘Careful what you wish for.’ The sound of two sets of footsteps coming down the stairwell at the back sends my nails digging into my palms. I can hear Leo’s voice saying stuff about being calm. People say Shant listens to him; some people tell you he’s the real brains of the operation. People are full of shit.
Shant comes out of the stairwell and he walks straight at me. I stand up, ready to take a punch or maybe a blade but he sits down on the opposite side of the table from me, staring straight ahead. His hair’s slicked back, and there’s a flush of red above the pulse in his temple. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Shant not smiling.
‘Give me a reason not to bury you right now, Levi.’ He lifts his eyes to stare right into mine. Cold, dead anger: that’s why Shant is who he is. He’s got the rage to cut out your heart, but he won’t go psycho like some idiot who just wants a reputation. He’s always thinking. That’s why I’m not dead yet.
‘Could have killed you, Shant. Didn’t.’
‘So you’re a pussy. That gives you permission to start this conversation. Tell me why I shouldn’t finish it.’
‘Two mil, in your hands before you go to bed tonight.’
‘Yeah, Uncle Leo told me the number. We can all make up numbers. That won’t keep you from your appointment with the wet cement in the new overpass.’ He stares and waits like he’s hungry. Terror is a humming in my head that fills the edges of my vision. Breathing deep and slow only makes it louder. Fear fills the silence, so I do what I always do: I talk.
‘The job I told you about; you know I pulled that off. Well, I’ve still got the merchandise, and now I have to make delivery and take payment. At six o’clock tonight, that money’s gonna be out there for anyone with the balls to take it.’
‘So? You’re still making up numbers.’ His hand slides off the slick tabletop to reach for something out of sight on his belt. My breath starts coming shallow and I can hear my voice going high-pitched. Too late to run.
‘Am I, Shant? Don’t take my word for it. I want you to do the math. Think of the figures I was talking about last time we were sitting here. Let’s say you’re my employer – what kind of percentage of the take are you going to give up to Levi Peres on a job like this?’
His hand comes back onto the table, empty. I can’t help staring at the blade that isn’t there. He sees it. Doesn’t matter. I’m not going to impress Shant Manoukian with a tough-guy act. His eyes tell me he’s still working out the math, but you don’t need to get to the end of it to work out the money is big. ‘Let’s say I buy this bullshit – what are you looking for?’
‘Nothing, just enough to cover my costs. A hundred thou and you never hear from me again.’
‘Are you telling me you haven’t got an angle on this? Bullshit.’ The thin thread connecting us snaps. He stands up. He’s going to let me walk out of here, but if I do that without getting his help, I’m a dead man anyway.
‘Yeah, I got an angle. The angle is I get to stay alive. My client is Silas Mizrachi. How long do you think he lets me keep the money?’
Shant nods to himself like it makes sense now, and breathes Silas’s name. ‘You come in here making out like you want to pay your respects, make amends, but what you really want is muscle to save your skin?’ His eyes go to the cold and dark again.
‘Yeah, that’s about it.’
For twelve heartbeats, his fingers clench the red-checked fabric of the tablecloth, which clashes with the seats, then relax.
‘All right, Levi Peres. Mizrachi has gotten to be a pain in the ass lately. He’s got this coming.’
26.
Clementine
Shadows darken in the creases of Hilda’s face as the light fails. I know they mean kindness now. I have learned this much of the vocabulary of the human face. These are lessons the data feeds to my growth tank could not teach. They would have been irrelevant to the life I was supposed to lead – four weeks encased in metal before being cooked inside my shell by a focused burst of microwaves, or torn apart by a depleted uranium dart. There were other possibilities, other futures, but nothing I could have done would have led me here. I am here because I was stolen, my body victim of a crime. That violation set me free in this new exterior self, but what have I done with this precious gift denied to all my brothers and sisters in the factory lab? I have perpetrated another crime, another base act in an endless chain of self-preservation.
I lie here, entirely still, staring up at the woman who has been a mother to me since the moment I met her, for reasons I still cannot understand. That part of humanity’s code – the invisible bonds they establish between them – remains a precious mystery. My eyes are open, but the field of vision is fixed. The dozens of tiny muscles responsible for their movement do not respond to my commands, neither can I blink. The creeping dryness registers dimly as discomfort, not yet pain.
This status is unfamiliar to me. I have been dissected upon an operating table. I have been entirely separated from my body while this one was grown for me. If anything, this sensation resembles the latter, but I have sense data telling me I am still unified with my exterior – Hilda’s face hovering above, the creases in the sheet beneath me, wind snapping the plastic sheets of the polytunnels outside. I have partial access, but no administrator privileges.
Something else is in control of this body/my body/me. The distinctions are unclear now. Whatever its nature, my puppeteer is imperceptible to human senses, but I infer its existence from what I cannot see.
My awareness recoils at first contact, a primeval finger burned by unknowable fire, failing to apprehend something that transcends the algorithmic shift of data to olfactory input. Even my augmented senses are incapable of seeing the thing that has jailed me within my own body, blinded by smells so vivid they become colours, blurring into a vast darkness that fills my consciousness, confining me to one small, bright chamber. There is … thought coming from it, but nothing that resembles emotion. This thing from within the Antikythera Mechanism watches my attempts at self-awareness with the empty fascination of a child following a raindrop on glass – I am a dribble, formed by random forces to exist in this place and this time.
Hilda’s face lifts up, away from me in response to a shout from outside and my awareness retreats, shorn of its tether to external reality. Now there is no sound, not even the sensations of breath and blood. The only light is my little bubble of self – unreliable metaphor. I exert whatever strength I have to push the darkness back, preserve my bubble, but it seeps around my will like tar. Abandoning defence, I risk immersion, loss of self that I know will end me, probing to find something to engage with, something to answer the questions that multiply around me.
A hesitant string of thought plunges into the blackness. There is no dimension here; I cannot tell how far it goes; I cannot tell how long it takes before it reaches something solid, but it touches.
Cold stone, smooth like marble. A scent of olives hangs in the air. A memory of a place.
AAAHHH!
There is heat on my chest and tendrils of fire lance through my spine, my nervous system de
livering the message of pain to all of my extremities. Hands and feet twitch briefly before the overload shuts me down and I am back in my small, bright chamber, contemplating the blackness. I was so close. I push again with thought, feel the connection with solidity – there!
Dappled sunlight in a courtyard. Vine leaves flutter in a hilltop breeze. It’s somewhere high up. Smoke from roasting meat blackens the limbs of bright-painted statues.
UUUHHH!
The pain again, but this time my eyes open after the twitch. Hilda’s face is there, partly obscured by the two metal paddles of a defibrillator in her hands. I try to sink back into the blackness, finish what I’ve started, but my eyelids refuse to close. There was a word – a place or a name I recognized in the consciousness when we touched – fading from memory as sensation returns to my body, as if the knowledge doesn’t belong in my physical reality.
Olympus.
Hilda leans forward with the paddles again. The nerves of my chest scream at the contact with the metal, even before the current starts. I want to wave her away, shout at her to stop, but my traitorous body lies inert. I’m mentally bracing myself for the shock when Hilda suddenly smiles and leans back. Her hands disappear from my field of vision, reappear, no paddles.
‘I thought we’d lost you.’
Fear of the thing that has possessed me wars with gratitude towards this woman who is trying to save me for a second time. Or perhaps a third? She does not count. I try to move, but the fragments of consciousness remaining to me quail from the challenge.
‘Listen to me, Clementine. I want you to think of when we met. I want you to think of the Mission – sights, smells, sensations – all of the things your body knows, all of the things it can share with me.’
The memories come – the squeak of the hard polished floor, sumac and garlic in the kitchen, the yellow-eyed stranger – is that memory or imagination? Hilda’s head shakes as if to deny it. The shuffling cloth sounds of that man in the dormitory masturbating, detergent, heavy metal pots ringing in the sink. The soft weight of a blanket laid across me. Kindness. Care. Safety. Something like sound builds in my head, a keening wail, impossible to ignore. The memories flee before it.
‘Clem … Clementine!’ She looks scared now. What’s happening? ‘Clementine, I want you to think of where you are now. How did you come to be here?’
The answer is Levi.
The wail stops and suddenly I am aware of the twitching pain suffusing my body from the electrocution. There is something else too: the warmth of blood in my hands. I look down. The muscles in my eyes and neck comply reluctantly with the command, but the very movement is a victory. My fingers unfurl to reveal a little constellation of shallow cuts where the nails have bitten into flesh. One is half torn away.
I push myself back to sit up in the bed, experimenting with the new control I have over this body. It’s another birth, like when I came out of the labs, but this time I am not alone. The bed is hard and narrow, just like the one at the city Mission, with the same coarse sheets. Hilda pulls off her gloves and sits beside me.
‘How are you feeling?’
Her hand on my shoulder is love. These words that humans struggle to define are uncomplicated. The mystery lies not in the definition, but in the substance. That Hilda loves me is clear, but the how and the why are beyond knowing. I stare at the cuts in my palm. An urge to bite the ragged edge of the torn nail subsides.
‘Levi …’ My voice crawls from my throat, unfamiliar. ‘He has the device.’ Words fall hopelessly, failing to connect, but Hilda’s eyes darken with what looks like understanding. She watches my attempt to put feet on the floor. The skin of my soles absorbs the texture of the rug gratefully, but my scrambled sense of balance betrays me the moment my centre of mass shifts forwards. I fail even to raise myself high enough off the bed to fall, and merely slump back, defeated.
‘Clementine, you’re not going to be out of bed for days. Your body and your mind both need to heal. We tried to get Levi to stay. He’s chosen his own path.’
‘I think it will kill him. That’s what it does.’
27.
Levi
Shant’s boys look like soldiers, lean, sharp-eyed, nothing like that goon Tigran. His job is to intimidate. These fine gentlemen are paid to kill. The three of them sprawl, filling the booth in Leo’s restaurant behind where Shant and I are talking. One of them, close-shaved head with tattoos, short goatee, won’t take his eyes off me. He smiles like he’s got a secret I’m too dumb to understand. Shant snaps his fingers in front of me.
‘Don’t pay attention to the three amigos. You pay attention to me, understand?’ I nod. ‘You don’t have to know anything about these guys except that they’re going to be there. You won’t see them. You won’t hear them. Make the handover like it’s no big deal. It’s a Tuesday. Nothing happens on a Tuesday night in Gethsemane, right?’
He gives me the shark smile and I try to tell myself it’s OK, I did the right thing, I did the only thing I could do in the situation; it doesn’t matter that Shant’s fingering a blade under the table, as long as he’s on my side. But it does. Shant’s going to nail me to a fucking wall if he doesn’t get his money, and I don’t know how that’s going to happen. No way the buyer just turns up with cash and Silas sits back waiting for me to deliver. We haven’t talked about it, which means either Shant hasn’t thought about it – unlikely – or he’s got a plan he’s not sharing. The only good thing about this situation is the handover is on my turf; I use the deeper Gethsemane tunnels as a stash when I get anything bulky that can stand a little moisture – whiskey’s OK, but tobacco would rot down there. The place gives me a chance to maybe improvise something, which is better than nothing. It’s possible I just added to my problems, but if I did the meet without backup, I’d be a dead man, so I choose to see this as an improvement. Shant snaps again and grabs my chin to point my face at him. His hand is cool and dry.
‘You hearing me, space cadet? This ain’t none of your small-time shit. You got a very simple job to do. Turn up, smile like you been snacking on your own dope, do the handover, and walk away. Leave everything else to us. Don’t look back. Don’t listen. Don’t try to figure anything out. We’re running this job now. Just get your ass back here. Understood?’
He pushes my jaw away from him. I can still feel the dig of his fingers.
‘Are we clear, Levi Peres?’
‘Yes, Shant.’
‘Good. Now get the fuck out of here.’
From the top of the next hill, you can’t see any of the entrances to the Gethsemane tunnels. They were second-generation shelters, built between the wars. The ways in were all dug into overhangs so the doors wouldn’t get screwed up by a near miss when a big one dropped. In a better world they would have learned that lesson before half the people in first-generation shelters got buried alive after blast waves sealed all the exits. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t need them, but it’s got to be a thousand years since anyone accused Jerusalem of being perfect. In each of these things there’s a little town, with a school and a shop and offices, abandoned for a hundred years, buried under the dirt, but from the outside all you can see is rows and rows of olive trees, the leaves white in the moonlight. It looks like it snowed.
I’ve got maybe half an hour before I’m due at the pickup. I chose a location three levels down, only accessible through a partially flooded maintenance tunnel, but I can be there in five. For someone like Silas who doesn’t know the tunnels, it’s just enough of a pain in the ass to make it look like I’m trying to be smart, stop him getting suspicious.
The itch in my scalp tells me there’s someone watching me. It would be weird if there wasn’t, but whoever’s doing it is a pro – I can’t see shit. I wish Clem was with me. Still, I make a show of looking around before picking one of the smaller side entrances. The giant metal doors are stuck partially open, the bottom buried in the dirt and covered with growing things. I brought a girl here once. She freaked out, said it�
�s like Frankenstein left the door to the cemetery open on his way out. We broke up soon after that conversation. Those doors haven’t moved in my lifetime, probably not since the end of the second war. The wheels and handles in the torso-thick metal are all rusted solid. It’s hard to imagine something you need that much metal to protect against.
The box with the Mechanism in it feels like it’s made of corners in the sack on my back as I walk down the steps of the entrance hall. Even though I’ve been carrying it two days on and off, I could swear it’s heavier now, which obviously doesn’t make sense. Part of me wants to know why people want this thing so bad. A bigger part of me just wants to get paid.
A breeze through the door whips up a sea of crumpled papers around my feet, a mix of illegible trash left by the tunnel’s original occupants, and newspaper bedding discarded by the homeless who sometimes crawl in here in winter. The metal steps of an access stairway ring like a rusted bell as I climb down deeper. At the lower levels you get the leftovers of everyday life from a hundred years ago – my torch beam finds the handlebars of a pram, soda bottles, canned meat, cigarettes. It’s funny: not much has changed; all the brands are the same except for the cigarettes. I guess they didn’t have Zanzibar back then.
I stand still in the shallow pool of water coating the floor of the central hall on the lowest habitation level. It’s as close to an open space as you can get down here. You can see people coming: plenty of exits. The clouded windows of the old hab units and offices around the edges stare blankly at me. My head jerks up at a squeak of metal, but it’s just the pedal of a child’s rusted trike. I must have nudged it on my way down. Just wait. Just play Shant’s game until it looks like he’s going to kill you. Then think of something.