Outlier

by Kyle Harris

  “If I tell you,” said Kennedy, “you must know we’re swimming out to sea, far out to sea, and that sanity is the sandy shore behind us. I’d say their theology is maddening, but the doctrines of fundamental Christianity contain their own demented perspectives of our universe and human history. It is, like the whole of religion, a sophisticated psychosis.”

  Chaz shrugged.

  “Okay. The Begotten Sons.” He let the words hang for a moment. Then: “Have you heard of Jesus Christ? The Son of God, the Forgiver of Sins?”

  “Sure. I think he’s got a couple holidays.”

  His mouth smiled a little, but the rest of his face couldn’t be bothered. “My father tried to shove religion into my arms when I was young, and that meant spending an hour each day reading the Bible and reporting back to him what I had learned. The canon of the Gospels, these indisputable accounts of the life and death and life again of Jesus Christ, lay the foundation for what is Christianity.” His expression soured, as if the words induced a bad taste. “What you first must know is the Christian understanding of Jesus Christ—that He was not only the Son of God, but God Himself. He was born from God, and was also God. You following?”

  She nodded.

  “Now, I won’t bore you with all the banal details. Only this: shortly after the Last Supper, when He had gone to pray in Gethsemane, He was betrayed by one of His own Apostles, Judas. Jesus was arrested, tried, dragged to Golgotha, and put on the cross.

  “The four Gospels all chronicle this sequence of events and, sparing some details here and there, they line up. But about fifty years ago, some self-proclaimed historians published a new Bible: the New Revisionist Standard. And suddenly there was a fifth Gospel—because four accounts of a fictitious man’s life were apparently insufficient. Now we’ve reached the hot, molten core of this toxic world the Begotten Sons live on.”

  Chaz sat forward, attentive.

  “In this new amendment to the life of Jesus, He did not travel with His disciples to Gethsemane after the Last Supper. Instead, He lay with a woman, a woman who became pregnant with His child. A child of Jesus Christ, and—because I told you Jesus Christ was also God—a child of God. A begotten child of God; not like man, not made in His own image. Born by His own seed.” His pause seemed to cool the room a few degrees. “The Begotten Sons believe they are the descendants of Jesus Christ. Of God.”

  Chaz sat back in the seat. She opened the documents from Dodders’s drive. Nathan something, wasn’t it?

  It popped up. Timothy 14:21. AND JESUS BEGET IN NATHANAEL THE BREATH OF GOD, SON AND LORD.

  “Nathanael.”

  “Rina saith unto the unborn, ‘Behold, Thy son; O Righteous Lord, glorify thee with Thy joy and love.’” Kennedy downed the last of his smoothie. “The Begotten Sons lay claim that His progeny are superior to everyone else, that they have God’s consent to cleanse our society of outrageous sins.”

  “Including homosexuals.”

  “Yes. Including the worst sin that government still tolerates. They believe it is upon them and them alone to torture and eradicate the homosexual demons. And they will slaughter and lynch until the task is finished.”

  Murdering people for something they had no control over. If wiping out masses based on their skin color was genocide, then so was this. “How many are there?”

  “Fewer than there were. But it gets even crazier. Tracing blood relation that far back, more than two thousand years, is impossible. They aren’t descendants of Jesus Christ any more than you or I, but faith stands on the detritus of facts. They only seek purpose, even if that purpose has no basis in truth.”

  On the elevator ride down, Chaz retrieved her tasker again and pulled up the decrypted attachment. If it was a comprehensive roster of all the gays in the city, there was going to be another name on it.

  Except no result came back.

  Coincidence, my fucking ass.

  Since the Pruitt family blow-up, Chaz had accepted another looker job—not only because it was easy money and the payout from Kennedy was yet to be official, but also because it gave her something to do.

  The scoop: Richard Barton, an eleven-year veteran of theater and musical performance—notably the long-running Shakespearean productions of Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream—had expressed concern that his sister, Clare Navarro, had picked up the needle again after being clean for three years. What was his basis for that suspicion? Besides some noise from her husband about her frequent late-evening disappearances, jack shit. In Chaz’s opinion, the case had all the makings of another whisker biscuit wanting extra gravy. But it wasn’t her business to assume. Her job was to report facts. Record audio and video, type up her findings, get paid.

  The turnaround required a week, but not because Clare was a shut-in.

  Strapping her to the tether was easy enough—she had a former welfare account, and everyone in the database came with facial-rec datafiles. From there, it was the practiced and time-tested routine of monitoring the target on surveillance and watching out for any odd behavior patterns. The outlier revealed itself on the first two nights: a dump called Elysian Apartments. Both visits were more than an hour but less than two. Enough time for a fuck. Too short for injecting heroin. Chaz cross-referenced the address with family members and friends, but nothing was even in the vicinity.

  The location of the hidden schlong? Probably. Except there was a hurdle: the place didn’t have interior surveillance other than in the lobby. Facial-rec pegged Clare there both nights, but she wasn’t meeting her secret lover out in the open. Smart. Browsing the list of tenants was another hopeless cause. There were 184 total registered names—a fucking dartboard.

  The solution? Rig the joint with her own surveillance. Obviously.

  Chaz dusted off her trusty case of Renell 360-degree wireless cameras. The tech details read like erotica—hemispherical design, strong reusable adhesive bases, color-changing capsules for discreetness, private network with included firewall, and access to Renell backup storage.

  On the third day, she equipped the bottom four floors—square layouts—with two cameras in two opposite corners. The position of the cameras gave her vantage points for two hallways each. The live feeds were streamed to her private server through the building’s internet, neatly arranged tiles synchronized with live facial-rec running in the background.

  Clare never stopped by for dessert.

  Fourth day. Also no sighting.

  Fifth day. Target spotted entering the premises. On the feeds, the elevator stopped once on the third floor to let someone on, but that was it. Shit.

  Sixth day. More legwork. Chaz gathered her cameras and moved them up four stories, changing the surveillance swath to floors five through eight. Other than a Moorland custodian civvy who was cleaning the bathrooms, nobody saw her.

  Jackpot. Romeo was on the seventh floor, but Chaz couldn’t ID the mystery man on account of the perspective. But she got an apartment number: 719. Home stretch.

  Seventh day. She retrieved all her cameras except for one, which she placed high on the wall opposite the door to 719. The camera’s auto-detect hue-adjustment feature made it nearly invisible against the butterscotch-colored wallpaper. To save herself the chore of extrapolating messy audio from the camera’s boosted mic, she stuck a separate mic to the jamb underneath the door. Now any conversation inside the apartment would be picked up loud and clear.

  Time for the main event.

  Clare arrived on schedule. Knocked. Waited.

  And behind door number one…

  The brass numbers shifted, turned. A woman about Clare’s age with dirty-blonde hair. Clare called her Samantha. Chaz opened up the list of tenants and found the name. Samantha Fletcher.

  While they disappeared inside and made irrelevant conversation that bounced from weather to politics to a collection of porcelain feline figurines, Chaz pulled up a search engine on her desk and typed in the woman’s name. Top hit: relationship shrink.

  “Have you de
cided how you’re going to tell him?” It was the stoical of the two voices. Samantha’s.

  A couple heartbeats later: “No. I don’t think I can do it.”

  “You can.”

  “But what will Richard think? And the theater? And of course there’s my husband, and my father-in-law, who’s a pastor. I’ve told you that he thinks people like me are…” Pause. “Diana thinks I should just go for the divorce. Not tell him the truth. I could say something, but not that. Not the truth.”

  “Why? Do you think the truth would hurt?”

  “Yes. It would make everything so much worse. Like Diana said, I could just say I’m not attracted to him anymore. The spark’s gone. Which it is, but he won’t know why.”

  Samantha cleared her throat. “In my experience, truth is always the best option. It will hurt immediately. But with a lie, the pain will only come later and last longer.”

  “You probably say that to everyone else, but you’re not like me.”

  “I have many clients who are like—”

  “But you don’t know.” Clare’s tone was creeping toward irate. “You want to know what happens when you tell the truth? When I was in college, I knew someone who came out to his parents. Because he thought the truth would help. A week later, he’s almost beaten to death by some of his cousin’s friends. And he was lucky! He said that! He said that the Lord was on his side because he wasn’t murdered.” She took a deep breath. “That’s what happens when we tell the truth.”

  “Does Diana’s family know?”

  “That she’s a lesbian? She doesn’t talk to them.”

  “And would you cut off contact with your family to be yourself?”

  Fifteen seconds went by, and there was no response. Chaz thought the mic’s battery might have kicked the bucket—it had been a while since she’d replaced it—but the life bar hadn’t dipped into the red yet. And the camera’s mic outside showed the same stopped-heart waveform.

  Then Clare popped back in: “I think so. Because I love Diana. What I had for my husband was what people told me to feel. And that’s all they do, isn’t it? All I heard when I was growing up was that I shouldn’t chase the boys. When I got older, the same people told me I should get a handsome man. A doctor. And everywhere I go in this city are the billboards telling me to buy lingerie so my husband will appreciate me more, telling me to buy perfume or jewelry. You ever notice that? Everything and everyone wants me to be straight, like what I am isn’t normal.”

  “Being gay is not illegal, Clare.”

  “Neither is going a month without showering, but people will look at you like that’s what you are to them. Like you stink.” A long pause. “I just don’t want to make a choice that I’ll regret for the rest of my life. I don’t want to leave behind the people who appreciate me for who I really am. Nine million people live in this part of the galaxy—How many chances do I really have to find someone?”

  Chaz switched off the recording.

  Fuck.

  Two days after the Kennedy meeting, she visited Elysian Apartments one last time to recover the camera and the mic. Now for the compulsory report where she would explain to Richard Barton that there was nothing to worry about. His sister wasn’t shooting up; she was just a lesbian. Lay the info out, no prejudice.

  Except she felt a prick in her chest when she tried to type the words. After staring at the screen for thirty straight minutes, she reached for her tasker and opened the list of The Unrighteous. Clare Navarro’s name wasn’t on it. Then she had accomplished something that even Chaz hadn’t: stealth.

  How? What the fuck was her secret? It didn’t matter; if Chaz reported her findings, Clare’s life might be ruined.

  It didn’t feel right.

  In the end, Chaz used a polite and regretful tone when apologizing to Richard Barton about the lack of evidence for Clare’s latest drug habit. She proposed that maybe Clare was just visiting friends, and nothing from the research suggested she was doing anything harmful. Chaz also refunded the down payment since no verdict had been reached.

  Later that evening, she dumped her stash of hormones into the trash. After silencing her noisy stomach with reheated tofu dumplings, she sat at her desk, swaying and looking at her tasker.

  It had taken her ten minutes just to touch Libby’s name and open the chat feed, another ten to tap COMPOSE, but so far the message space was blank. The longer she sat there, the more it felt like the part of her brain that would make the words appear was behind a brick wall. Maybe if she banged her head on it enough, it would give her something.

  How often did people stare at a screen trying to figure out the magical formula to tape a relationship back together? Or was there a magical formula? Maybe the internet knew.

  As Chaz was pulling up a search engine, her tasker chimed. New message in Libby’s chat feed.

  |: CHAZ, ARE YOU THERE? I NEED YOUR HELP.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The details of whatever Libby needed help with couldn’t be discussed over a tasker chat feed. Just the place to meet: Urbanus Stroma. An upmarket clothing outlet, per a quick search query.

  Chaz agreed to the meet-up.

  A juvie counselor had once talked about the satellite technique: “Imagine you are in orbit around yourself, able to see what everyone else does. Tell me what stands out to you.” On the Metro, she looked at her own life as if it were a rocky, crater-pocked moon viewed through a telescope. Cold, barren, incapable of supporting life—Sounds about right.

  The counselor wouldn’t just jot down what you said about yourself but also what you didn’t say about yourself. Psychoanalysis, or some shit. It was how they determined which parts of your brain were fried. So, Chaz imagined being in someone else’s shoes, someone in the train car. The middle-aged lady with frizzled hair in front of her seemed a good enough candidate.

  Okay, besides the oppressive shadow of menopause about to eat me, and my husband banging a coworker, and the crack pipe under my son’s bed, what the hell’s up with this weird-looking girl next to me? Why is she staring? Is she…oh, she must be one of those queers I keep hearing about, terrorizing the youth. God save her soul.

  Their eyes met. Chaz looked away so it wasn’t awkward. The satellite technique was probably bullshit anyway. Just another way the frauds made the kids feel better about themselves without actually doing anything.

  The car bumped and lumbered on its track.

  She took a deep breath and turned her attention back to the lady. The sounds and scents fell away, and she thought. Really thought. No jokes, no stereotypes.

  She saw herself.

  You’re still staring at me. Why? Do you hate me? You don’t know anything about me, so I don’t know why you’d hate me. Or is it because you don’t know what else to do? You just stare because that’s what you do, that’s all you ever do. You stare like you’re in a zoo looking down at the animals in their cages. Fascinated and glad that you’re not one of them. Look around, kid. You’re in a cage too. We can all imagine ourselves outside the bars, looking in. What makes you special?

  Shit. Even an imaginary voice was degrading her. No wonder delinquents chugged rubbing alcohol or slit their wrists after getting out of juvie. Rehab was a fucking scam.

  On the window, a woman tried to pitch a brand of oral contraceptives.

  People who’d had near-death experiences liked to talk of this tunnel of light. While lying there with a stopped heart—and the docs scrambling to restart it—their mind had ascended on the magical escalator toward heaven. To them the tunnel was proof of a real, bona fide afterlife.

  Chaz had read an article once about idiots doing that intentionally, turning the heart off for a few minutes and coming back, just to glimpse what the hell was on the other side. They could get the same experience inside Urbanus Stroma—the tunnel of white, the symphonic background music, even the feeling of being taken to a higher plane of existence. And without the cover charge of a flatline.

  When she saw Libby, every muscle
in her body went tight. The butterflies flapped in her stomach again. It was like being back in the club.

  Just the stress of the job. That’s all it was, right?

  Libby was smiling. Good start. “Hey,” she said.

  Chaz went over to her. “Hey, Libs.”

  Deafening silence. Her mind was a crossword puzzle of apologies, none of which she could fill out. But she had to say something. If not honesty, then a performance. Getting back into the Pruitt household depended on it.

  “Libby, listen,” Chaz started. She looked down at the floor space between them for maximum effect. “I’m—”

  “No,” interrupted Libby. “Chaz, please don’t apologize. You would only stretch your honesty thin, because I can read it on your face that you don’t want to. I am the one who should be seeking your forgiveness.”

  Chaz looked up. “Why?”

  “Because you defended yourself.” She very gently took Chaz’s hands. “You even defended me when I didn’t have the courage to speak for myself, and that must have taken tremendous strength on your part. All my life, my father has crucified those that I brought into his home. He even accused my first girlfriend of infecting me with what has always been inside me, like it was a sickness.”

  Aida Nelson, Chaz recalled. Pruitt had even tried to sue her. That fuck.

  Libby went on: “I’m sorry, Chaz. I’m sorry for my family, and I’m sorry for what you had to endure. I wanted to believe it would be different this time, that they would finally accept me for who I am.” Her fingers were cold and restless, squeezing. “My search for God has shown me a Christianity that recognizes and accepts people like us, but my father’s faith is different. His heart is filled with hate and cruelty, and I don’t believe he is close to God. Otherwise he would have welcomed you into our home, and he wouldn’t have continued to condemn my feelings for…”

  Hug moment? Hug moment.

  As Chaz drew her in and embraced her, she thought back to Beverly. They’d never hugged. That’s not to say they’d never been intimate; they’d just never shown affection like this. A part of Chaz had been sure she’d never recognize the cue. It was something else behind that brick wall in her head, like the site for a forgotten expansion zone.