King of Code

by CD Reiss

  Catherine came to the doorway with a tray. “You didn’t come down to dinner.”

  “I forgot. Sorry.”

  “Barnard came by to see how you were getting on.”

  “Barnard?”

  “A large gentleman.” There were no tables. She put the tray on the floor. “Fuzzy hair.”

  “Butthead?”

  “If you must.”

  Well, I’d certainly stepped in it. That was what I got for not asking his real name.

  “And Orrin called. He said to tell you the battery’s coming in the morning. Your car will be ready.”

  A car. So simple, yet… everything. A car equaled an option. I’d been short on options until just then.

  Catherine pulled her cardigan around herself. “We never fixed this room because I didn’t want the ceiling ruined.”

  “You can fix the mycelium without ruining the ceiling. It’s tin.”

  She looked at it dreamily. Harper was her exact opposite. Catherine had rounded edges and a soft voice. Her sister’s edges were going to gut me.

  “This was my room,” she said. “Daddy gave it to me when he and Mother moved to separate rooms. Those flowers? He had them put in for me when I was having a hard time. Look, over here.” She pointed toward a dim corner.

  I looked at what she told me but didn’t see what she saw.

  “Those open roses with the leaves up like that? In a V?” she said.

  “Yes. It’s…” Weird? Off? Not flower-like?

  “That’s Harper.”

  I got up on tiptoes as if the extra two inches would help.

  “She was always running around,” Catherine continued.

  I could see it when I stopped trying to make it a flower in my head. The petals of the rose next to her made a skirt that flowed in the wind, and the beige center of the flower was a little girl’s face. The more I looked at it, the more it looked like Harper.

  “And I was always trying to get her to stay still and read or pay attention or do anything.”

  The leaves of the rose next to Harper were around her sister, and looking at it, squinting, I saw Catherine’s face in the details. She stopped looking up, and I did as well. We regarded each other in the yellow light.

  “A lot of things happened in this room. A lot of tears under these flowers,” she said.

  “I know why you don’t want it ruined.”

  “Do I bother you at night? People say they can hear me cry all over the house.”

  “I haven’t heard it,” I lied.

  “I keep saying I’ll stop.”

  “It’s your house.”

  “I’m not upset about not having anything left. Or the conditions I live in, compared to what it was. I wish I’d lost it all sooner.”

  “Why?”

  “The thing about money, Mr. Harden, is that it burdens you with expectations. You get this impression that everything you do matters to other people. And it’s not true. Everything doesn’t matter. Only some things matter, and those things have to be attended. But the rest?” She shook her head. “I’m being cryptic. I loved a boy who didn’t have any money. My parents, and this was the only thing they ever agreed on, they found this unacceptable. He disappeared.”

  “Is he alive?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. My father had the ceiling done to cheer me up.”

  I smiled. I couldn’t help it. The irony was unavoidable.

  Catherine saw it too. She smiled and waved as if swatting the entire thing away. “I should have taken it down, but I still like it.”

  “You’re a masochist.”

  “I am. Now. Your soup is getting cold. When you’re done, leave the tray in the hall.”

  “I can—”

  “No arguments.”

  I tried to argue anyway, but she left with a wave.

  I didn’t eat much. My brain was calculating.

  I wasn’t halfway home. Not without the second decryption code. Was it easier for me to get the Caddy, go back to California, and deal with my shit? If she wasn’t going to shell out what she’d promised, I didn’t have to hang around and provide services.

  And the ability to leave gave me leverage. I could leave, or I could stay, depending on whether or not she produced the decryption code.

  But I was leaving.

  The decision to go back to the familiar calmed me until I fell asleep.

  XXXIII

  In the morning, Harper was nowhere to be found. There wasn’t a peep from behind the locked door, but there was a new lock. As if that could stop me.

  I’d pick it when I had something to look for in there. I’d pick it so hard it would blow out the jamb.

  Catherine was AWOL. Everyone was. The house was cold and empty. I made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and looked out the back window, onto the thorn garden.

  A dog barked from the front. I shoved the last bite in my mouth and met Percy on the porch. Orrin got out of his truck.

  “Found you,” he said. “Your phone’s dead.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Harper said you were sleeping.”

  Percy licked my fingers then stuck his nose in my ass.

  I pulled him away and stroked his neck. “Where is she?”

  “Over at the glass works.” He pointed toward the backyard and over the horizon.

  It didn’t matter where she was anyway. Not at all.

  “I’ll get my stuff,” I said. “And I’ll get the car out of your shop right away.”

  “Came to tell you about the car. The battery was four hundred dollars.”

  “No problem, I—”

  “Then the damn rental car company came and towed it. I didn’t have a chance to even get the battery out of the box. And I can’t return it. Fucking policies.”

  I was cut off from another route the fuck out of Barrington, and this dude was worried about a few hundred bucks. “I need a ride to the airport. I’ll give you the four hundred for the battery and another four hundred for the lift.”

  Percy barked as if he thought it was a great deal.

  “I gotta open up the shop.”

  “Later, then.” Maybe I sounded desperate. I didn’t care.

  “Might be able to get you a ride tomorrow. Everyone’s over at the works, scrubbing down for Fitz. Word is he’s coming around to look into buying the works building.”

  Harper had mentioned him a million years ago, on the roof of that same factory. I knew him I could call him up and tell him the citizens of Barrington were good people but shithouse crazy, if I had a phone.

  “I have to go.” I’d already turned back toward the house. I was distracted. My brain was sorting through puzzle pieces. Harper. Fitz. Barrington. QI4. Silicon Valley Magazine’s “Most Eligible Tycoon of the Year.”

  “I’ll come around tomorrow,” Orrin called behind me.

  “Sure.” I didn’t know if he heard my mumbling. Nothing was clicking, but I knew the pieces fit.

  I went right through the house and upstairs to pack.

  Past the river reeds, maybe a quarter mile back, I could see the top of the factory. Men were up there, five, maybe six, moving in and out of sight. They weren’t meandering or fucking around. They had a purpose to their movements.

  I went back up to my room, which had a better angle on the factory. The people on the roof moved slowly, bent down, got up. Harper had spray painted code lines up there. A coded message that put me on notice. I was going to be humiliated.

  I smiled. I couldn’t help it. Fuck her. I wasn’t giving her an inch I didn’t have to. I was going to get my fucking boot decryption and be done with her.

  A female form walked onto the roof. Long, wavy hair, too far away to discern blond from brunette, but her arm went up and touched her face. I could see her, in my mind’s eye, folding the crease in her bottom lip.

  XXXIV

  The factory wasn’t far as the crow flew. I had no idea how to get across the river or what other manmade barriers were between t
he Barrington mansion and Barrington Glass Works. Without satellite or GPS, there was only one way to find out.

  Past the bed of thorns, patches of pines huddled amidst a grass flat. From above, I hadn’t noticed how well tended they were, with moats of dirt around the base of each trunk. Spring birds chirped. Cicadas screeched. The sky above was a huge dome broken by the receding mansion and the trees I passed. I came to the tall reeds, which were taller than they’d looked from above. A dirt path opened up, and the sound of the trickling river joined the sounds of birds and insects behind me.

  There was a smell. A not very river-ish smell. The reeds closed around the path until it was a foot wide, then it crooked hard right, then hard left, onto a wooden bridge.

  The river was the source of the smell. I pulled my hood around to my face and covered my nose. A white sign on a rusted chain swung across the entrance to the bridge.

  CONTAMINATION ADVISORY

  Avoid contact with soil and river sediment. Use soap and water to wash river water and sediment off skin completely.

  United States Environmental Protection Agency.

  I wasn’t going back to the mansion. Fuck that. I went under the chain and crossed. The bridge itself was on concrete pilings, and the whole thing was in pretty good shape. The painted metal rail was worn at the top where people would put their hands, but I kept my hands in my pockets. The wood boards creaked but were solid enough.

  The river looked like any other river, not that I’d seen hundreds. The water wasn’t brown, and there wasn’t a ton of garbage floating in it. The reeds grew tall. A weeping willow bent over the stream on the other side. The tree didn’t look good. Otherwise, there was just the smell.

  A four-foot-wide corrugated metal pipe ended at the shore. It was dry inside. Whatever had flowed from the factory into the river no longer flowed, but the toxicity remained.

  I ducked under the chain barrier on the other side. It had the same contamination warning.

  So much for that.

  The factory was in my sightline. The graffiti had been reduced to no more than a tinge of color. Some was a light blue wash that matched Harper’s fingernails from a few days before. Cars were parked on both sides of the chain link, and the gate was open. Huge twenty-foot dumpsters were lined up against the walls. I jumped when glass crashed from inside one.

  A man waved to me from a window-sized opening on the third floor. “Sorry!”

  I waved back and went in the same door Harper and I had used last time.

  Where there had been desolation before, the place was abuzz the second time. People everywhere. Talking in groups, pushing brooms, dragging black plastic bags, wiping down the walls. I waved to Reggie and Kyle, who were throwing garbage out the window, then I ran up the stairs, two at a time, to where I’d last seen Harper’s figure against the sky.

  She pushed a broom across the roof, moving red-stained liquid into the drain. She stopped, moved the broom quickly over an area to scrub, then pushed again.

  “You’re too good to push a broom all day.”

  “Wrong.” She didn’t look at me. “No one’s too good to push a broom.”

  She swept hard, sending a wave of frothy red water away. The semicircle right behind the broom was bare for a split second, and I could see how much her work had faded.

  I was in her way. The red water lapped against my shoes. They’d be ruined. She pushed the bristles against my toes, and still, I didn’t budge.

  “Taylor.” She leaned on the handle.

  “What?” I crossed my arms.

  “You’re in the way of the drain.”

  “I’m leaving today.”

  She tapped the bristles on the tar, keeping her eyes on the little red splashes. “How?”

  “I can still get a cab. I can get a lift. I can walk thirty miles to the next train station. You can have one of these guys tie me down. I know at least some of them are in on it. I don’t know who, but it doesn’t matter. You’re trying to brainwash me for when Fitz shows. I don’t know if you’re going to play on our relationship or try to get in his jock. But I’m out. I have enough problems. I’ll get past your lockdown on my own.”

  She leaned on the handle again, finally making eye contact. “It’s just a mess in here.”

  “Who’d buy it in this condition? Not a guy like Fitz. He’s an OCD case about business. He’d only buy a spotless factory in a spotless town.”

  “So? We read up. We’re smarter than we get credit for.”

  “Good on you. You don’t need me anymore.” I got out of her way and headed for the door.

  “I don’t want to sell QI4,” she said, and I had to stop to listen to the rest. She knew how to keep me, that was for sure. “It’s wrong to sell it.” She kept sweeping. “It’s one thing to lock it and make you pay to unlock it, but selling it to someone else is just wrong. But I will. I can get a lot of money for it.”

  Keeping cool was probably the hardest thing I’d ever done. I could barely stand the thought of my code being inaccessible. The thought of it going to someone else made my hands hot. “You do what you have to.”

  “Bummer though.”

  “You’re going to have to figure out the ‘maintenance’ part that’s so important to you.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  She was in control. I’d forgotten that as a kind of survival instinct, but when she reminded me, I was hell-bent on not showing her how much it bothered me.

  “Maybe. But you’re in a world of shit yourself.” The bite in my voice didn’t make me sound tough. It sounded like overcompensation. A presentation of aggression from a man with no power. If I’d felt in control coming across the river, I didn’t on the factory roof.

  “If you finish the job with me, you’ll get your system back.”

  “You already broke one promise.”

  The last of the red water went down the drain. On the west side of the building, old furniture and garbage crashed to the ground amid the grunts and shouts of the men hauling it out.

  “I don’t know why I’m here,” I said. “I don’t understand what you want or why. Why the sexual favors?”

  She picked up a heavy bucket that sloshed when lifted. “They’re for me, okay? Everything I told you is true. The reasons you were brought here. All true. But the sex stuff?” She went to another patch of graffiti on the ground and plopped the bucket down. “That’s for me. I got everything I could out of online bullshit. Stupid dirty talk with strangers. I’m done with it. So yeah, there’s a little revenge in there, but that’s the deal.”

  “You know, when you lie, your nose looks like it points up a little more.”

  She dunked the broom in the bucket and scrubbed the spray paint. “Stay or leave. Let me know what you decide.”

  She gave no guarantees, no promises, offering around a deal so ambiguous and unenforceable I didn’t know where I stood from one minute to the next. I couldn’t measure her. She was movement, not mass. All options and potentialities, but no answers.

  The sky over the roof was a dome of clear blue, like a ceiling with limits. It promised that if you went high enough, you’d touch it. It lied. It was an illusion of the finite.

  I got off the roof before it pressed me into a dot.

  XXXV

  “You know what they’re doing to you? They’re setting you up. They’re telling you your life might be shit, but at least you’re not him. And you, they’re telling you he’s out to get you. And you two fucking idiots believe it.”

  I heard Johnny’s voice echo through the second floor as I came down the metal steps. He had a hand on a shovel by a pile of debris, and the other hand pointed at one of the Hispanic dudes I’d seen at the lunch area, while he yelled at a guy with a yellow bandana.

  “I’m so sick of your paranoid bullshit.” Bandana pushed Johnny’s shoulder. I’d met him the same night I’d met Johnny, but his name escaped me.

  “Who benefits? Ask yourself.” Johnny was undeterred. “You? Have you benefitt
ed one bit from thinking you’re better than Florencio?” He pointed at the Hispanic dude. “Cos when you do that, he’s not gonna rise up with you and crush them fuckers at the bank. He’s gonna come against you. You dumb shits are too busy fighting between yourselves to fight together.”

  “I can’t stand this pendejo.” Florencio grabbed a broom that had fallen on the floor and got to sweeping. “But you’re worse.”

  “You!” Johnny pointed at me.

  “What?”

  “When you rich fucks talk to banks, you talk about this shit, right? Don’t fucking lie.”

  “No. We just talk about money.” I got close enough to see his wrist. My watch sat on it like a twenty-thousand-dollar game of nine ball. Johnny’s tattoos were all gears and numbers. I got the feeling he’d known exactly what it was worth when he’d made the bet. Seeing him wear it bothered me. “Nice watch.”

  “They’re out for us.” Johnny turned his full attention to me. Bandana flipped him off and dragged his bag to the window. “Make us fight so they can take the spoils.”

  “You know you’re crazy, right?”

  “Sure, I’m crazy. Seeing what I’ve seen will make you that way. They have all the money, but if we worked together, they couldn’t stand against us. This ‘anyone can make it’ bag of shit they sell us keeps us complacent. Makes us blame ourselves. Bullshit. Pure bullshit. Ask anyone here. All worked hard. Now we can’t see a doctor. Can’t drink the water. Can’t give the kids an education. Don’t tell us we didn’t work hard, and we’re not the only ones. And once you see it? Once you see what happened to us, you start to think, oh my God, is that what they been doing to black people this whole time? And yeah. Shit changes, and you go fucking crazy.” He pushed his shovel. The debris was heavy, and he put his weight behind it. “Now we’re cleaning up for—”

  He lurched back, crying out in pain and dropping his shovel.

  “Johnny!”

  “My back!” He fell to one knee, hand just above his butt. “God damn it!”

  I caught him, but there wasn’t much I could do.

  “Oh, for the love of fuck, John-boy!” Kyle came out of the woodwork and held up his friend. “This is your lazy ass.”