by Nick Mamatas
That was my burger wrapper. At least, I presumed that Lilian was smart enough to spot it. They say you should never give a sucker an even break, but maybe I’m just a sucker for a sweet smile myself. She figured out that Jonothan had somehow had a lucid moment and booked down the street toward Shattuck. That was a crowded street, with bookstores and nicer restaurants and a couple of good movie theaters. Pretty apolitical scene—I call the little shopping zone “The Gelato District.” She ignored the calls for her to stop, to freeze, that came from inside the co-op. Jonothan stumbled after her, howling about how no no, he was back in hell now. And he was going to be, soon enough.
I don’t quite know everything that happened, not even now, so please do forgive the embellishments. Maybe the cop wasn’t a woman, but a male pig with a high-pitched voice. Perhaps Lilian didn’t even consider that the cops would run her car’s plates, even if she looked like a semi-innocent victim. But most of the events of that night are easy enough to piece together. I wasn’t part of the riot. I’d been sitting in Cory Hall all day, munching pizza, reading the flyers, waiting for my chance.
I had a police scanner feed in my Bluetooth, and I’d tapped Lilian’s smartphone two days after she showed up with her acoustic guitar and sob story about a touchy-feely daddy on Central Park West she was running from. My hotrodded version of FlexiSPY gave me access to her text messages, her phone logs, the semi-nude pics she liked to take of herself in front of the bathroom mirror and send right to Daddy. Thanks to her phone’s built-in mic and GPS app, I could listen in on her conversations and Jonothan’s idiot ramblings, and keep track of her location within a few feet.
Yeah, I’m a sleaze, but I’m a sleaze for the Revolution. Lots of people come through Berkeley, and some of them are even authentic anti-capitalists. But most of them are like Lil and Jono: police agents provocateur or middle-class thrill-seekers who want to exploit us before settling down to a bourgeois lifestyle of voting for the Democrats and employing undocumented workers from Mexico to raise their Ritalin-addled children. So when they knock on the co-op’s door, I keep an eye on them. Lilian thought she was a big deal sneak thief. She had a few identities, a “Daddy” who was a banker back east with a hankering for a Q-chip of his very own, and a soft spot for wounded little puppies like Jonothan. Hell, I thought she was just a reporter when I saw her at first. She had the clean nails of an office worker. When I cracked her phone—whoa doggie! The town has the nickname “Berzerkeley” for a reason, and that reason is omnipresent political paranoia. But even I didn’t think that we’d be infiltrated directly by the forces of international financial capital.
Like I said, her plan for the Q-chip was almost a good one, and she was able to mimic our politics enough to come up with a snappy slogan and a Utopian vision of a future without credit scores. She was so good that all I had to do was make sure everything on her checklist happened an hour earlier than she wanted, and that Jonothan would be an albatross. A little ketamine goes a long way, but even with all the other stuff wrong with that kid, who could have predicted something as weird and poetic as Cotard delusion?
It was easy enough to send the Telegraph Avenue kids a text from Lilian’s phone a bit early—yes, in the Bay Area, even the homeless and dirty have cell phones. Lilian had figured out which lab held the Q-chip designs and prototype, and all I needed was a credit card . . . to jimmy open the lock. She was surging up Shattuck a little too quickly for me, so I texted her. no walls, no doors and welcome to the gelato district. Triggered every one of her ringtones. Turned on her MP3 player, full blast. Made it easy for the cops to find her, and they did. There was always tons of street noise on Shattuck thanks to the buses, the buskers, the constant murmur of a dozen conversations and latté orders. I could barely hear the order to halt, but Jonothan’s moaning came over the aether loud and clear. Then Lilian did something that was actually pretty brave; she pulled out her phone and started recording.
I got the video—Jonothan lurching toward a pair of cops. Two kids, really. They had mace and told Jonothan to stop, but he wouldn’t. “Your guns won’t work on me,” he said. “I’m already dead. ” They shouted for him to get down on the ground, then hosed him but good with the mace. He just wiped it from his eyes with his sleeve. Lilian was really screaming; she cared about him, poor girl. The cops called for backup for the 5150 they had on their hands, then tried a bright yellow Taser. Jonothan looked down at the wires on his chest and pulled them free. “You pigs, you pigs! The whole world is watching!” Lilian shouted at them. Then they rushed her.
She was right. The whole world is watching, thanks to her. And to me, of course. Lilian’s plan was ultimately a stupid one. She was going to steal the actual, physical Q-chip prototype and then have it couriered through a private high-security messenger firm—the type that specializes in transporting uncut drugs, little girls, kidneys on ice, and exotic pets—back to New York City. And to do what? What would Daddy do with it, except smash the little chip with one of the awesome decorative paperweights on his desk, or maybe crush it in his very palm like the squash-playing power-tie-wearing alpha male he thought he was? Total twentieth-century industrial society thought. Maybe he’d spend a spare billion dollars over the next five years trying to reverse-engineer it . . . except that the Q-chip could redesign its own next generation in five seconds. Stealing a computer chip is about as effective as tearing up a mortgage document or telling the devil, “I take it back!” after selling your soul.
So I didn’t steal the chip. I copied it, to share it with all of you. That was the beauty of the Q-chip—it wasn’t much more than a whiteboard full of equations and a few receipts, paper receipts, for materials I’d found on the secretary’s desk. I was probably picked up by some security camera, maybe spotted by a few co-eds while weaving the Q-chip stuff between the frames of Lilian’s video, but it won’t matter. No walls, no doors. You won’t see me on the news—call me Anonymous if you must. The video is already going viral. Jonothan, zombielike, lurching toward the cops and taking a beating without feeling a thing. Lilian shrieking then falling, then a pair of cops towering over the camera, their batons thick as redwoods. And between the frames, information sufficient for any grade-school hacker, garage tinkerer, or steampunk Maker to whip up their own Q-chips. Everything’s possible, starting right this very second. Berkeley really will be a nuclear-free zone now, because anyone with the Q-chip can simultaneously disable every warhead on the planet. You’re welcome. No prison can hold me, for even the cells at Guantánamo Bay are controlled by computer.
Jonothan’s tattoo is part of a longer saying—We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute. That’s Buenaventura Durruti, an old Spanish anarchist. And he’s right. So was Jonothan. He may well be dead by now, but he is everywhere all at once, expanding in every direction, all across the Internet, carrying a new world with him. It’s growing every minute. A week from now, you won’t recognize the planet. Yes, I’m a criminal, but I’ll be the last criminal ever. No walls, no doors, no crime, no inequality, no state to arrest us or capital to protect. You shall all be freed from hell, your souls returned to you.
ru there to get the gift??
____________________
About ten years ago, I became highly interested in short noir fiction as represented by the journal Murdaland, which sadly lasted all of two issues, and the Akashic Books Noir Series of anthologies. England’s The Savage Kick Literary Magazine, the early issues of which were literally run off on a home laser printer, offered a highly engaging mix of underground noir and confessional fiction in the Bukowski mode. I loved the hard-ass business, the joy of vicariously living through protagonists who managed to live and fuck without first getting jobs or haircuts, and fiction with explicitly proletarian concerns and voices of the sort I grew up around. Naturally, I started trying
to write it.
Noir has much in common with horror and dark fantasy, but where a writer of the latter can depend on a bit of arm-waving—And then something numinous and inexplicable happens! Pretty scary, eh? Eh?—noir requires a hardnosed realism. Or it seems to. Benjamin Whitmer’s amazing novel Pike features a guy with his very own science fictional novum in the form of a screwy pacemaker that keeps him preternaturally calm when murdering people. Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt novels include Détection, an instructional guide for an anti-methodology of crime-solving that turns logic on its head. Throwing in a dash of science fiction seemed fine after all.
One issue I have with writing noir is that, like the meme says, “Shakespeare got to get paid, son.” There are few venues for it that pay more than $25 or so, and as someone who finds writing both exhausting and distasteful, it was hard to motivate myself to write anything that couldn’t also be potentially published as science fiction or horror. So when I saw the call for submissions for West Coast Crime Wave, an electronic-only anthology that promised a whole hundred bucks, and that had a limited geographical focus I qualified for, I went for it.
But, I needed a smidge of science fiction as well. And some horror, just in case. My friend Cassie Alexander, who wrote the Shifted series of urban fantasies about a nurse who cares for supernatural creatures, happened to tell me about Cotard delusion when I was thinking about a story for the anthology, so that was half of it settled. And good ol’ UC Berkeley is always good for high-tech hijinks, and it was all settled. One of my favorite things about Berkeley is its incredibly earnest Nuclear Free Zone signs on the town’s borders, so everything quickly clicked into place, and the story came out in a single draft. Anthologist Brian Thornton had never heard of me, and I was very pleased to get in on the pure merits of the story. The first-person apostrophe point of view (an “I” narrator speaking to a seemingly absent “you” character) intrigued him, and I’m always happy to be recognized for my formalism. Even better was noir master Ken Bruen singling out my story as his favorite in the book’s forward. When I launched my own attempt at a well-paying noir journal, The Big Click, I was able to contact Ken and get a story from him for our premiere issue. As far as West Coast Crime Wave, and the small press that put it out, not too much happened with it, sadly, so I’m very pleased to present “The People’s Republic of Everywhere and Everything” as the title story of this collection.
TOM SILEX, SPIRIT-SMASHER
THE COVERS OF THE PULP MAGAZINES were about as lurid as I had expected them to be—astronauts in bubble helmets, tentacles spilling forth from dark corners, and the breasts of women bound to slabs just barely obscured by wisps of silk or crackling pink lightning. I glanced over at Jeremy, who was looking across the diner booth table at the pulp magazine collector, who also looked just about as ridiculous as I had expected a pulp magazine collector to look. Plaid and suspenders in the Arizona summertime, a Santa Claus beard, and a peculiar bleating voice—as though he rehearsed his sentences, then recited them. There was a shard of French fry hanging from his fuzzy upper lip.
“So, Ms. Martinez, as you can see, Tom Silex, Spirit-Smasher, never made the covers of the magazines in which his adventures were published, but your grandfather’s byline is—”
“He wasn’t my grandfather,” I said. I smiled, not apologetically. There was something about getting to interrupt an old white man that always made me smile. “He was my grandmother’s first husband. She was very young when they married, and it didn’t last long.”
“When was that?” Jeremy asked.
“1950—she got a divorce and could never go back to church after that,” I said, stabbing at one of the pulp magazines with a thick finger. The pulp collector winced. “Grandpa was forward-thinking for the time and married her anyway. She always called Marcus Goulart ‘the rat bastard,’ after that.”
The pulp collector opened his mouth to say something, but then closed it.
“I’m Rosa’s . . . advisor,” Jeremy said. And boyfriend, obviously. He was a tall man, all long limbs, but he didn’t have to sit thigh-to-thigh with his client, as he was doing. “So, you believe that the rights to this detective character, Tom Silence—”
“Silex,” the pulp collector said.
“Silex,” Jeremy said.
“Silex is Latin for ‘flint,’ you see.”
“And . . . I’m not following.”
“Marcus Goulart was born Tom Flint,” the pulp collector said. “Many pulp authors wrote under pseudonyms, but Goulart actually legally changed his name.”
“Did you know that?” Jeremy asked me.
I shrugged. “I literally just told you every single thing I know about Goulart.”
“I have something to share. I looked into Goulart’s estate and copyrights very deeply, I searched every public record available. He never divorced your grandmother. They separated, surely, but there was no divorce,” the pulp collector said. Then he smiled. “Do you understand what this means?”
“What! My grandmother was a bigamist? My grandparents were never married!” My hand went up. I hardly even knew why. I wanted to smack the whole world across the face.
Why was the pulp collector still smiling?
The waitress brought me back to reality with a sharp, “Anything else over here?” She looked down at the magazines crowding the table and sneered. The pulp collector didn’t seem to notice that either.
“It means that you own Tom Silex,” the pulp collector said. “I’d love to publish the collected adventures in a new edition. As the sole copyright holder, you could license the stories to me, and even give me permission to solicit authors to write new Silex adventures.”
“What about Grandma?” Jeremy asked. He turned to the waitress and dismissed her with a twitch of his eyebrows.
“My understanding, from the Silver Alert I came across on Google, which is how I found Rosa, is that Mrs. Hernandez isn’t competent,” the pulp collector said. “Surely, a conservatorship . . .”
“No,” I said. “I guess not being good at paperwork runs in the family. The not-family.”
“. . . and there, amidst the swirling darkness of the old Wilkerson farmhouse, I heard the blasphemous chanting of a thousand psychopomps . . .” Jeremy read while I drove. “What’s a ‘psychopomp’?”
“A psychopomp is someone—like an angel or a spirit or the Grim Reaper—who escorts the dead to the afterlife. Sounds like trouble for Tom Silex,” I told him.
“Should I keep going?”
“Don’t bother. Don’t you think this was a waste of our time?”
Jeremy shrugged. “These stories read like crap to me. Some atmosphere, then he pulls out his Shadow Lantern, which makes ghosts visible. The quanto-mystico-electrical light reveals the state of their souls. Then he banishes them either by providing what they want, or destroy—say, how did you even know what a psychopomp is?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m just saying, it’s an unusual word. I didn’t know it.”
“And you went to law school,” I said. “Unlike me with my associate’s degree. Is that what you mean?”
Neither of us said anything for a long moment. Then I said, “It was a crossword puzzle answer. I looked it up.” It wasn’t true. I like reading fantasy fiction on my Kindle and such, but I always kept quiet about it. My parents were hyper-religious and suspicious of a girl reading. Even after a car accident took them, old habits died hard. But my grandma had been married to a pulp fiction writer? She owned an occult detective somehow?
“I only went to law school for one year anyway,” Jeremy said. “But I do know that sometimes some little story or idea can become something big. The original Superman comic was developed by a pair of teenagers.”
“We’re not talking big, Jer. We’re talking some guy who wants to photocopy old pulp magazines and sell them on Amazon for nine dollars,” I said. “The offer was five hundred bucks plus royalties. How many people are going to buy—”
“Maybe we should talk to Grandma about it after all,” I said. “After the homecare nurse leaves for the day.”
“There has to be room to negotiate,” Jeremy said.
“I can’t even afford to file for conservatorship.”
“I told you I could try; I just don’t want to make an error in filing. You need a real lawyer.”
“Grandma has to sign,” I said. “That’s it.”
I could always tell when my grandmother was having a good day. She would smile and say, “Hello, Rosa.” On a bad say she wouldn’t smile for a few minutes, then finally find a word and say, “Hola, bonita,” and then try a smile. On her worst day ever, my grandmother told the homecare nurse to leave and when the nurse wouldn’t, she lurched out of her easy chair, grabbed a rolling pin from a vase full of utensils on the kitchen counter, and swung for the nurse’s head as best as her frail arms could manage. The nurse ran to her car, and Abuelita followed her right out the door and then spent several hours wandering around the development in the hundred-degree heat till Jeremy found her and wrestled her back into the car. Thus the Silver Alert, and the visit from the pulp fiction collector.
Today wasn’t so bad, but it was not a good day. “Bonita . . . y guapo,” was how she greeted us. My name, our relationship, had left her mind again. I look like my mother, her daughter, so sometimes I am Daniela too. I count those as good days. The nurse—a new woman, you’d better believe it—silently started collecting her things to go.
“Abuelita,” I said. “How are you?” Grandmother’s eyes danced at that. She was a grandmother!
“I’ve been better, but I’m alive, thank God.” She looked closely at Jeremy. Mostly she remembered me on some level, but casual acquaintances were beyond the ability of her mind to retain. “What’s that?” She pointed at the folder Jeremy was holding. “I’m not signing anything about going to a nursing home. I have to wait for Santo. He’s coming home soon. I have to make dinner. He won’t let you send me away.”