Knuckleduster

by Andrew Post

  “All right, let’s say tomorrow. That work? I’ll have a room ready for you. That is unless you want to sleep in the barn.”

  “No.” Brody chuckled. “That’s quite all right.”

  They exchanged their good-byes and the call ended.

  Brody recalled his fonder memories of Thorp, all of which took place before the events in that Cairo alleyway. Thorp was always a troublemaker and a prankster, the gleaming life of the party where only gloom and homesick thoughts riddled their minds. Whenever their company was crowded into the boxy interior of the Terrapin ATV or in the troop carrier Darter launching from one dust-choked spot to the next, Thorp lightened everybody up with a crude joke—or a really crude one. Brody recalled how Thorp had acted out a particularly nasty one, standing in the middle of the two rows of buckled-in troops, humping the air and cackling like a madman.

  Brody looked forward to his trip.

  The train rolled into the station in Minneapolis precisely on time. Brody boarded and found a seat by a window but not before pausing at the steps into the train to take his final breath of city air for what he hoped would be long enough to forget the smell of exhaust and the ceaseless hum of interstate noise.

  Being Sunday, not a lot of people were heading to Chicago. He had a booth in the dining car to himself and enjoyed his coffee as they hummed along southeast well over two hundred kilometers an hour on an elevated track that provided a monorail zoo tour in fast forward quality to the trip, albeit one that wasn’t remotely exotic since it only featured cattle and the occasional horse intercut with long stretches of farmland after farmland, the occasional autumnal-colored hill, and scraggily patches of trees left to grow unbothered or even manicured in any way. Life that wasn’t planted for harvesting but just grew because it was there and always had been.

  The television mounted above the bar played to no one in particular. The news was on, expounding last night’s Vikings victory. Brody listened absently until the sports scores turned to grave news. A report detailing the cheerless unveiling of a monument at a Minneapolis shopping center. It was in memory of those killed last month on October 20 when Alton Noel, a retired soldier, had gunned down ten people before turning the gun on himself. “The Midtown Massacre,” as the newscaster called it, was one of the worst tragedies that had befallen Minneapolis in decades and spurred a new law enforcement effort in upping gun control.

  It was the first time Brody had heard the story. He took a moment to go through the roster of men that had been in his unit while in Cairo and decided he didn’t know an Alton Noel. Either way, the news was depressing—and sadly—it made him think of the man he was going to visit, the lonely ex-soldier. He silently scolded himself for making the comparison to his friend.

  The news team immediately turned to a sunnier story, the tremendous winnings a couple had scored the night before on Prize Mountain.

  Brody welcomed the whiplashing topic change, sipped his coffee, and watched Wisconsin roll past his window as if it were scenery on a revolving banner.

  The train pulled into Chicago a few minutes shy of two hours from when it had left Minneapolis. Brody got out into the crowded station. He knew he was in Chicago immediately. No question about it. It differed from Minneapolis in innumerable cultural ways. Women walked by in veiled hats and evening dresses made up entirely of whisper-thin fiber-optic material. Scrolling text and images of swimming sea life washed around on their elegant, tapered bodies.

  Once out of the station and onto the sidewalk, Brody saw the street people and their shock-value wardrobe: the chain-mail tunics with windows cut out of them to display plump, augmented breasts or tattooed buttocks. They flitted by quick as insects on old-fashioned roller skates with swearwords written in black pen all over the white leather. One slapped Brody on the shoulder and called to him in Russian, “Watch it, shit cake.” Certainly not something you’d hear in Minneapolis, where the most alarming piece of foreign slang talk was Norwegian.

  The rest of the people, those not out to shock, were mostly in suits and ties, one in three wearing a paper mask or a respirator strapped to their face.

  Brody weaved in and out among the onrushing wall of people who were so preoccupied with their ordis that they absentmindedly played chicken with everyone coming the opposite direction. He wondered if it just seemed like he was going against the flow and broke off onto a side street where the foot traffic wasn’t as congested. Here he could actually walk a straight line without having to move out of anyone’s way.

  He couldn’t help but look around, even if it made him look like a tourist. It’d been years since he’d been here, and while he couldn’t say it looked all that different, he had forgotten what a strange place Chicago could sometimes seem, depending on the neighborhood.

  Namely this one.

  Bundled tentacles of cables connected every building, as if some creature had pushed itself into and around every standing structure. Some were repurposed as lampposts, with the lights hanging on the horizontal columns of wires and tubes. In other places, if the tendrils happened to stretch in front of a business’s storefront, they simply tacked their sign directly onto it. Brody had seen a newspaper comic online about Chicago’s wire problem. It featured a man in safari apparel hacking at dangling cables with a machete in one hand, a briefcase in the other, trying to navigate the sidewalk to work. Now it made sense.

  When Brody’s father was young, he thought the idea of everything wireless meant that all telephone poles would disappear and repairmen would never use anything but a computer to diagnose a connection problem, the wrench and screwdriver as extinct as the dodos and lobsters. But as nice as advancements can be, the end product had a lot of work behind it and with more wirelessness came more need to make that wirelessness possible, which, funnily enough, resulted in more wires.

  Minneapolis had its share of wires but not like this. And as far as how everything else looked in Chicago compared to his city, well, that differed greatly too.

  Here and there were old-style marquees. Others opted—if they had the cash—for signage made entirely of holo. On every street corner, just like back home, were the air-scrubbing units mounted to the sidewalk as commonplace as fire hydrants.

  Again, Brody felt the need to step out of the churn of foot traffic to stand apart from it all and get his bearings. He feared if he just went with it, he’d end up walking right into Lake Michigan. He looked skyward at the view through the skyscrapers interlaced with more columns of wires and beyond that black net over everyone’s heads, unmanned police aircraft, drifting like paper airplanes being pulled along by strings, on constant patrolling surveillance. He had been in town only fifteen minutes, and already he wanted to leave. Cab. I need a cab so I can get the hell out of this.

  Four passed him up before one finally heeded his wave. He slid into the back, glad to be able to shut out the noise. Door closed, the self-piloting cab asked for his destination in a sober voice. The question had been recorded years ago most likely.

  Brody read the address from the e-mail Thorp had sent him.

  “Please insert jigsaw card to verify funds,” the cab requested.

  Unaccustomed to driverless cabs, Brody looked for the reader on the glass dividing the front and back of the car. He found it and slipped the plastic card in, with its jigsaw puzzle arrangement of black and white, stripes and dots, the bar codes and blocky robot text that only mechanical eyes could decipher.

  After a pause, “We will be more than happy to transport you to your destination today, but be aware that your bank account is currently in the negative. Your banking establishment has been kind enough to supply you with the necessary funds for this trip, but we’re afraid to inform you that you lack the necessary funds to go any farther beyond your requested destination.”

  “Okay,” Brody said, pinching the bridge of his nose. This news came without surprise to him. The train ticket had swept out those last ten credits, and now the cab was reaching a hand down into his bank accoun
t’s emergency funds. “Thank you for telling me.”

  “Yes, sir,” the cab said.

  Brody watched from behind the glass as the steering wheel spun around on its own. The cab gave a single burst of accelerator and wedged itself back into traffic.

  On the other side of Chicago, Brody felt the tension ease off him again just as it had when he originally left Minneapolis. The cab rumbled on the desolate two-lane road in the country. Expansive farmsteads and agricultural campuses flourished out from under the gray umbrella of pollution.

  In the fields, toiling with bent backs, farmers worked at picking the soil free of any large stones that’d make planting difficult, depositing them into burlap sacks lashed to their backs. Once closer, Brody noticed not a one of them was human. They stood on narrow legs that tapered down into toeless feet, just arrowheads that the robots trundled about on, elegant and weightless as flamingos. Narrow torsos and necks, heads made up of just a set of glass eyes and a round speaker approximately where a mouth should be. Artificials weren’t as common in the city, much to everyone’s surprise when they first came on the market. They were reserved for hard labor, sometimes cooking and cleaning, sometimes nursing home care, but most commonly in janitorial jobs and keeping the parks, graveyards, and roadsides tidy.

  The Artificials—or Arties—stood erect and turned to stare at the passing cab. It was strange how they got distracted so easily, but Brody figured they were a hot commodity in the farming industry and theft was common. If he were to engage in conversation or even humbly approach one of the Arties working in the field, he imagined they’d group up on him and calculatedly break every one of his bones. He shuddered at the thought as he passed the robotic farmers and looked into each set of their reflective glass lenses, unable to read any indication of what they were making of him.

  Just as they had raised their heads when the cab was approaching, they collectively lowered them when they saw the cab wasn’t going to slow or stop. They returned to work, silently toiling.

  The cab continued on, accidentally going through a stop sign at a deserted four-way intersection. After the turn, the road went from cracked pavement with faded lines to a two-lane dirt path, rocky and rutted in two opposing sets of tracks, those going into the farmland and those coming out.

  Brody rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. He waited for the cab to ask him to please put it out, but it didn’t. Clearly it was an older model. They bumped along for a few more miles and then turned into Thorp’s long gravel driveway.

  They approached a two-story rust-red farmhouse with dormered windows and a barn off to the side. The whole place needed a fresh coat of paint. The cab eased to a gentle stop, and a crunch sounded as the emergency brake was thrown.

  Brody waited, and the receipt fed out of the mounted printer, telling him his overdrawn account had just been shoved down to an all-time low of negative four thousand and ninety-eight credits. He got out with his solitary bag and approached the house.

  The cab reversed out of the driveway and started its lonely journey back to the city.

  Brody took a deep breath. The air smelled so different. There was something to be said about living out where the constant push and pull of the air on the streets wasn’t tampered with hypoallergenic filters or thick with the rank of wastewater and factory runoff. It made his throat itch, his eyes water a little. But it felt good, natural, being exposed to allergens and dust for the first time in years. It was a welcome irritation.

  He rang the doorbell and heard a series of thumps inside the house, heavy footsteps on hollow hardwood.

  The door opened and Thorp, aged faintly around the eyes and mouth—his laugh lines were more etched in and his crow’s-feet sprawled out nearly to his ears—smiled warmly. His hair was nearly gone on top, leaving a shaggy hay-colored mass that went over his ears on the sides and nestled down into the collar of his flannel shirt in the back. His freckled pate reflected the afternoon sun with a polished sheen. “Hey, hey, look who it is,” he exclaimed, pushing aside the screen door.

  They took a moment to shake hands, get the small talk about his trip out of the way.

  The inside of the house smelled like Thorp had just turned the vacuum off seconds before Brody rang the bell. Beyond that smell of vacuum-recycled air was the intoxicating aroma of ham cooking. Real meat. It had been years since Brody had eaten anything that hadn’t come out of a plastic wrapper or an aluminum can. Even America’s Favorite Automat joints that had sprung up all over Minneapolis and St. Paul only offered food that was made elsewhere, states away, freeze-dried and vacuum sealed only to be popped open and microwaved. Just like Mom used to make. Right. But here, this was something different—something amazing. He felt magnetically pulled by the aroma.

  “What’s that smell?” Brody asked, wide-eyed.

  His friend grinned—making the wrinkles he’d developed all the more obvious—and told him it was ham. Brody had to ask for confirmation that it wasn’t the fake stuff he was smelling, that minced mushroom and soy stuff pressed together like particle board to make fake ham. It smelled too good, he added.

  “Nope. Real thing. Guy up the road apiece raises pigs.”

  Brody hadn’t been exposed to allergens or eaten actual meat in years. It was beginning to feel like this wasn’t just a different state he had traveled to, but a different time. A time detailed by his grandparents.

  “So, how was good old Chicago?” Thorp asked, guiding Brody upstairs.

  “Congested,” Brody said. “Loud. You know, the way it always is.”

  “Well, that’s the city for you. You should think about coming out this way, buying one of these plots before the developers turn them all into highways. You could get lucky like I did and have them put some wires over it and you’ll be made, my friend. Hark Telecom pays me ten grand a month just to have those wires going over my property.”

  “No kidding?” Brody said.

  He hadn’t noticed any power lines or wires running over Thorp’s property. It made him pause because he considered himself more observant than that, but power lines looping overhead was beyond a regular sight in Minneapolis or Chicago.

  Thorp opened the door to a small bedroom with a bed and a three-drawer dresser. He threw out his arm in a grand gesture of presentation and allowed Brody in.

  Brody looked it over, nodded, and set his suitcase down on the floor.

  “Coffee?” Thorp asked.

  Brody nodded.

  “I’ll go get it on the burner. Make yourself at home. I’ll give you the tour whenever you’re settled.” Thorp clomped back downstairs.

  Brody changed out of his peacoat into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. As he stepped into the bathroom, red digits reared their ugly numerals. 02:59:59.

  He sighed. He’d have to squeeze a charge into the lenses sooner than he had thought. He had a collection of the batteries with him, but all of them were nearly solid to the shake. He knew that while he was going to enjoy his vacation, it wouldn’t be without the constant worry about money and how seeing in color might have to wait a few months. Brody decided he’d wear the lenses until they counted out the very last second. He hadn’t seen Thorp in a very long time and wanted to enjoy the stay—and all its colors—for as long as he could.

  He came downstairs to the smell of not only the ham in the oven but fresh coffee. When he turned the corner into the galley kitchen, he saw that Thorp was making the coffee on the stovetop. The coffeepot had a glass bubble, and percolating into it was the warm brown liquid. With an oven mitt, Thorp took the coffeepot from the burner and put it on a trivet on the counter.

  “Quite a place you got here,” Brody commented.

  “Thanks,” Thorp said, obviously distracted by the roasting pan he now had out of the oven and was diligently trying to scrape the ham from the bottom of.

  Brody looked around the walls. Medals hanging by their silk bands from nails, a few framed plaques, a couple of photographs of their unit. He found himself and Thorp st
anding side by side in the middle, their arms over one another’s shoulders, cigars in the corners of their mouths. The photos were printed on standard ink-jet paper, pixelating the images around the edges and slightly mussing the colors from an apparent shortage of blue in the cartridge when the picture had printed. The men in the photo appeared to be wearing yellow camouflage, and their faces were redder than an Egyptian sun could’ve ever rendered their flesh without actually … broiling them.

  The thought happened before he could catch it, and he made himself turn his thoughts elsewhere. Instead, he concentrated on the image itself, the men before they’d been burned alive, the people they were.

  It had been taken the day before the ambush in the Cairo alley. They had just gotten news that after their final sweep of this particular quarter of the city, they could go home. They were prematurely in celebration, unfairly ignorant by the blindfold of fate, that the following day would prove to be something that would forever stain the two men’s minds. For Brody, though, it would prove doubly worse—being struck blind would be waiting for him a week beyond the tragedy.

  He studied himself in the photo, young, the crew cut, the cigar—smiling like he had something to smile about, some victory achieved. He wanted to step closer to the photo and hiss at his past self: “You fool.” That kid with the body armor, holding the assault rifle like some sort of hero, was totally unaware of the curveball headed toward him just a few hours later.

  Brody wanted to ask Thorp if he ever thought about that day but decided not to. It was a dumb question after all. Of course he did. Brody knew the events of that day probably passed with more frequency in Thorp’s mind than his own. He moved away from the photograph, blinking away memories.

  “Out here all alone?” Brody took a seat at the kitchen table. It was an easy estimation. The place was decorated like a man lived here—no curtains, just venetian blinds, no framed pictures besides the ones that featured military guys. In the living room there were no decorations save for a mounted buck head on one wall.