by Andrew Post
“Shit.” He pulled at the collar of his shirt, hoping that the act would release the sensation of being garroted. It didn’t. Not in the least.
9
Brody knew that once he was out the front door of Nectar’s apartment building he wouldn’t be allowed back in. Everyone was overly cautious—mostly rightly so—and someone buzzing in a person claiming to be a repairman was a fluke in the armor of suspicion that people, especially in Chicago, had built around themselves. Brody didn’t want to chance someone calling the police.
He pushed back out into the cold and listened as the door eased shut and electronically locked. He stood at the top of the stoop and looked around at what he had available to him as a place to set up camp until Thorp answered his phone. Feeling over the signage for the nearby storefronts, he discovered most of them were scrolling texts—those he could not read. But directly across the street, with an old-fashioned sign made up of blocky neon letters, was America’s Favorite Automat. So they did exist in Chicago.
Being a bachelor who had little idea how to prepare anything that didn’t come from a box, Brody considered America’s Favorite Automat—a chain of twenty-four-hour cafeterias—a second home. In an AFA he could order a meal that tasted something akin to homemade, even though it didn’t fool his taste buds because in his youth Brody ate only made-from-scratch meals prepared by his mother.
The AFA in such close proximity to Nectar’s apartment building was like fate dropping a crumb in his lap. He triple-checked both ways for oncoming traffic and sprinted across the two-lane street and went inside.
It was reassuring that the AFA let him in. There had been many a time that he approached a burger joint, and the doors locked as soon as he put his hand on the glass, a soft voice saying: “We’re sorry, but our services cannot be rendered to customers who currently have a deficit in their credit account. Be sure to stop by when your financial troubles have been rectified. Thanks and have a pleasant day.” It was one thing to be told off by a person, quite another by an entire burger joint franchise.
It was empty of patrons as many AFAs were during the day. They were mainly a place to get a cup of coffee while on the road or a slice of pie in the middle of the night when sleep was being an elusive little shit.
He took a seat at the counter, and a woman immediately strolled out from the back on soft-soled shoes until she came right before him, turned, and looked into his face with a warm, welcoming smile. The smooth, calculated motion of the woman in the sundress and apron made Brody think of the clock on his grandmother’s kitchen wall. On the hour, two little figures came out of their respective doors and slid along on tracks where they met at a bell in the middle and took turns hammering it with tiny wooden mallets. This fluidity of motion and the somewhat unsettling nature of her unbreakable eye contact told Brody that this woman was an Artie.
His sonar felt around the soft rubber over her mechanical facial musculature. The eyelids clicked closed to mimic blinking. “Well, hello there, dear,” the woman said in an equally warm prerecorded voice that sounded like countless TV mothers Brody had grown up with. “Welcome to America’s Favorite Automat. What sounds good to you on this cold, cold day?”
“Uh, just a cup of coffee, please.”
“Dandy. Would you like that with cream and sugar, just cream, just sugar, or black?”
“Black, please.”
“Would you like to try any of our flavored nondairy creamers?” She rattled off a list of foreign and domestic creamers, some of which he had never even heard of.
“No, thank you.”
“Okeydokey. Be right back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” She smiled, turned, walked away, thumped through the double doors without putting her hands out before her, just slammed right through face-first.
Brody was a little disturbed by the transaction. He didn’t really like ordering from an Artificial. Who knew what she was doing in the kitchen? He hoped it was organized, with everything sterilized, but there could be a dead body on the floor, swollen and blackened with decay, and an Artificial, unless it was programmed to notice, would stroll right past it.
Shaking the thought away, he looked around for a bathroom. He wanted to put his lenses in so he could watch for anyone resembling the grown-up version of Nectar head into the building across the street. Toward the back, beside the constantly rotating clear plastic shelves that displayed the dessert offerings, was a set of doors. He figured that was the bathroom, since each door had a plaque on it. He stood up and headed in that direction, unbuttoning his coat as he did.
He paused, wondering if the server would come out with his coffee and see him not there and figure he left. Did it have the common sense to know that human beings needed to use the can from time to time? He considered shouting into the kitchen to tell her where he was going but decided against it, fearing it would just cause confusion and delay his coffee.
Brody found the door at the back of the Automat was the bathroom. Noticing the urinal fixed to the wall, he felt proud of himself that he had guessed correctly and gone into the men’s. It wouldn’t be the first time he accidentally walked into the women’s restroom with the sonar on.
Once he was satisfied his hands were clean enough that he could perform open-heart surgery if he had to, he removed the sonar and put the lenses in his eyes. His reflection slowly emerged out of the gloom. He peered into his own brown eyes and blinked a few more times to get all the clinging motes of blindness out of them. He had a few seconds of perfect vision before the flashing digits came into his view, reminding him that he had only an hour and a handful of minutes before the lenses lost their charge completely.
He replaced the sonar and the lens case into his pocket and went back into the cafeteria.
The server stood at the counter where he had been sitting, a cup of steaming coffee in her hand. She had a quizzical look on her face, as if he had played some cruel joke by turning invisible on her. She detected him approaching and swiveled around. Now, with the lenses in, he could see her eyes were painted to look like a disarming shade of sky blue. The smile hitched up again, servos audibly whining in her cheeks. “Oh, there you are. I thought you skedaddled on me.”
“Nope. Just had to use the restroom.” Brody removed his peacoat and dropped it onto the next stool and saddled up to the counter.
The server set the cup down before him with surprising grace. She released the loop on the mug, straightened her finger, and withdrew it from the ceramic C on the side of the mug without ever nudging it. After she smoothed her apron, she put her hands on her hips and cocked her head, like a dog hearing a distant whistle. “You look familiar. Have you been in here before?”
Brody hissed. The coffee was scalding. He dabbed at his burned upper lip with a paper napkin. “Not in this one before, no,” he managed.
“So you have visited another franchise in the America’s Favorite Automat family of restaurants before? Because we have locations all over the globe, even one in Tibet. That may be hot, by the way.”
He knew exactly where this was going. Back when the AFA was first introduced as a futuristic chain of eateries with their Artificial servers—that in itself a novelty at the time—there was a craze in personalized service. Whenever you entered an AFA and used your jigsaw card to pay your tab, the AFA put your order into a databank at their corporate headquarters. So whenever you visited another AFA, the connection was made and the server would suggest what you ordered last time. But because Brody often liked to use cash and the Minneapolis-St. Paul AFAs mostly had human servers, the Artificial was confused. It had partial data on him, knew he had visited but didn’t have a record of what he ordered.
“I have been in other AFAs, yeah,” Brody answered, going with it for as long as his patience would withstand. He had a lot on his mind after all. He was penniless and stranded in Chicago, for starters.
“How would you rate the overall service at America’s Favorite Automat on a scale from one to ten?” the Artificial asked.
“What’s this about?” Brody said.
“Excuse me. I didn’t catch that.”
“Why are you asking me this?” Brody said a degree slower.
“We just want to know how we can improve our already renowned service at America’s Favorite Automat to provide the most stellar experience anyone could ever want.”
“Are you asking me whether or not I prefer human servers over Artificials? Is that what this is about?” Brody asked, holding the cup of coffee within range of his burned lip for another sip. He was in a playful mood, if a somewhat malicious one. It was a shitty day, and talking in circles and confusing a robot was a way to blow off some steam. What would it do? At most, it would reduce the friendliness factor in its personality matrix and fuck off and go wash the dishes.
“We, as a family company, just want to get the everyman’s—and everywoman’s—point of view. We want to know how we can provide the best service we can and—”
Brody interjected, “If you’d like to put this on my record and never allow me in another AFA the rest of my life, fine—or as you’d put it: dandy—but I just want to have a cup of coffee and take a load off for a minute. All right?”
The servos in the Artificial’s cheeks whined again, and the smile returned. “Certainly, dear.” She turned and paced away, slamming through the double doors face-first again, and was gone.
Brody finally took a second sip after blowing a few times. It was then that he noticed the music playing. “What a Wonderful World” came down from overhead. He tried his best to ignore it since today he did not agree.
He lit another cigarette and swung around on his stool, eyeing the constantly twirling wall of desserts. Pies he could now see the actual color of, not just wire-frame estimations of them. He watched them rotate past—dark, dark cobalt of the syrupy innards of a slice of blueberry. The gory red of strawberry à la mode. The peaked tips of the meringue atop the key lime, browned ever so delicately at their summits. The absolute peerless desserts only a robot could make.
His phone jingled and he answered, never taking his eyes off the everlasting dance of the pies.
“Hey,” Thorp said, languorous.
“Thanks for calling me back. Thought I was going to have to get in the soup line here in a minute.”
“Sorry about that. I can’t take real intense conversations anymore.” A second flicked by. “Did you try the lock?”
“As a matter of fact, I didn’t,” Brody said with mock levity as he watched that slice of blueberry pie slide by for the third time. Three bucks. Oh, to have three bucks right now. The sugar high could last him months.
“No?” Thorp said.
Brody turned on his stool to look out through the front windows of the Automat. He glanced at the stoop across the street. No sign of activity. “No, I didn’t break into your sister’s apartment. Because that is against the law, as if I needed to be the one to remind you of that. And jail ranks up there in first place, followed only by the DMV as far as places I try to visit as infrequently as humanly possible.”
Thorp sighed. “I just want to know what the hell’s going on.”
“I know you do, but I honestly think you have nothing to worry about. Nectar probably signed up, maybe filled out a few forms, got her physical, and went home and changed her mind. When I first enlisted, after that hellish physical with the guy tugging on my nuts, I sure as hell considered never going back.” He kept watching the stoop.
“But it freaks me out. She’s not at the base; she’s not home. Where the hell is she?”
“She’s probably out with friends. I mean, she’s—what? Twenty-four? I’ll still find her and ask her to call you. Don’t worry.”
“I-I tried calling her a minute ago, and she didn’t answer,” Thorp stammered.
“Like I said, she’s probably out, has her phone off.”
Sighing into the receiver, Thorp blew a gale of static on Brody’s end. “All right, I’m just going to come out and say it. And you might be pissed at me, because this sort of changes things in a way. So, here goes. Nectar came by exactly twenty-two days ago.”
Brody considered asking him if he was sure about the number of days, but something in Thorp’s voice stopped him. He imagined Thorp staring at a calendar with the days Nectar had been missing crossed off.
“She told me she was going to enlist, I told her she shouldn’t, and we argued. It got a little … heated.”
Brody wondered if this was the point when his friend was going to confess to murdering his own sister.
Thorp continued, “I told her about the shit you and I went through in Cairo, and she still wanted to do it. She was adamant. The next day and every day up until you arrived last night I’ve been calling her a couple times an hour. Constantly, man. I even tried last night after you went to bed.”
“Well, there’s your answer. She blacklisted your number,” Brody said, thinking it best to say something encouraging even though he knew it truly didn’t sound good.
“I’ve gone to her place. I’ve e-mailed her. I even went to her job. She’s nowhere.”
Brody groaned, feeling the whole thing folding itself around him. The grip constricted around his neck, cutting circulation to everything else. Chiffon, his rent, his mountain of community service hours—all of it bled away, automatically shoved off as wholly unimportant. The only thing that remained was the foggy image of Nectar at that backyard barbecue ten years ago: freckled and awkward with a polite smile.
“Have you called the cops?” Brody asked, grave.
“No.”
“You should’ve.”
“I know.”
“This isn’t good. This is missing persons. They have people, entire departments, devoted to this stuff, and now that I’m involved, poking around at her apartment, at the base—I’ll be the number one suspect. Hell, my probation officer even knows I’m here. We take this to the cops now, my goose is cooked. Probable cause, my record, courts backed up, they’ll put me on the fast track. I won’t see a courtroom for a year, and the prisons aren’t exactly full of friends of mine.”
“I’m sorry.”
Brody took a minute to ponder it. “Where does she work?” he asked, his voice solemn. There was no shrugging off the hold this thing now had on him. The scent, while faint, was on the air—he had to keep sniffing. There was no way to shut that part of himself off anymore. Each sniff caused another foot to step forward involuntary, and that step would give him another deeper, clearer layer to the scent. If he allowed it.
“Well, she has this part-time job at Mama Wash dry cleaner.”
“Address. I’m not from around here, remember? Mama Wash could be on the fuckin’ moon for all I know.” He looked over his shoulder for the Artificial. Bad language in an AFA? That was grounds for getting kicked out. He was sure she’d take him by the scruff of his neck, and when he was out on his ass on the cold sidewalk she’d clap her hands of his dirt and remind him with a smile that America’s Favorite Automat was not a place for potty mouths.
“Division. It’s on Division Street.”
“Okay,” Brody said. “I’ll give you a call with what I find out.”
10
Two blocks up and one over. The sun made a temporary appearance, then fell behind ominous grayness. It smelled like snow.
Mama Wash was easily missed if one didn’t know what to look for. The scrolling marquee was all in Russian. Brody could speak it enough to get by. He had taken it in high school since it was rapidly rivaling Spanish as the second national language after English.
While crossing the street, he tried to recall those lessons from school on the rather difficult Slavic language since he figured if the marquee was in Russian, the employees would be more than likely to speak it as well. He pushed in through the fogged-over glass doors and was hit in the face with humid, perfumed air. He removed his sunglasses and approached the counter, behind which no one stood.
There was a constant clamor coming from the bac
k, banging machinery and the cling and clang of clothing with zippers and buttons making a disjoined, weird music in the rotating drums of the dryers. As he waited, he looked at the services the dry cleaner provided. Steam press, a folding service, alterations.
A middle-aged woman wearing a narrow sweatband lumbered out, her cheeks ruddy and her massive breasts hanging unbridled behind a thin cotton tank top. She dropped an armload of clean clothes onto a folding table and asked him in broken English, “Yes, sir? Maybe I help of you?”
“Yeah,” Brody said. “Do you have an employee named Nectar Ashbury?”
The woman’s already disgruntled demeanor turned a fraction more dour. She put her hands on her wide childbearing hips. “That girl. She has been gone two weeks—no call, no show. She is fired as far as I am of the concern.” After turning her head partly away, she kept her sharp eyes narrowed while asking, “Are you police officer?”
“No, just a family friend,” Brody said, trying to sound matter-of-fact, as if there weren’t more to it than that.
00:45:59.
He changed his tack; he needed to get what he could out of her while he could still see her face in color. She could blush or the color could wash out of her face during a lie, and he wanted to be able to see that change happen.
The woman raised a finger. “One moment.” She turned and yelled through the door behind her, “Paige!”
There was some clanging, a wet slap of damp clothes being pitched to the floor. A younger woman emerged. She resembled Mama Wash in a way, stocky and short, with a square face and close-set eyes the hue of warmed caramel. She, too, was braless and in a tank top. Brody couldn’t help but notice her breasts, unlike Mama Wash’s, still retained some of their elasticity and hung from her chest with resilience.
Paige looked at him, put her hands on the hips of her printed skirt in the same impatient way, then folded her arms over her chest. She grunted, “Name?”