All sniffed over their snifters, sobbed into their bottles, and glugged in their mugs. There wasn’t a dry martini in the house.
The surly sadist came back over to my spot. “You ever consider,” he whispered in my ear, “how no animal but man has the genius to kill himself? Human beings are the only species intelligent enough to consider taking their own lives.”
“But we’re not the only ones,” I said with a hiccup.
“Among lemmings it’s just a lark,” the snake hissed in earnest, “a symptom of their legendary impressionability—not glimmerings of real genius. A man, on the other hand, knows every moment it’s up to him to get it over with.”
I was thinking: I get it, a comedian of despair. He liquors me up to offer this ontological one-liner. What he did not know was that the gag was wasted on me. Not only was I not wowed by the ixnay-Homo sapien routine, I would have gladly persuaded him that he was right. Besides butchering the little he had probably picked up in a Philosphy-101 semantics course, he had accomplished nothing but invocation of an easy truism: The question is why not die?, not why go on?
A shriek from my pocket—I fumbled with the cell. It was the dispatcher. “You have to bring your coach back to the yard. Make it fast, Eddie.”
“But my return passengers,” I blubbered into the phone.
“Another driver has already been sent for the next leg. Get that bus back here, now.” The dispatcher hung up.
I felt woozy, but my cynical tormentor had challenged me on personal turf, and he had made one assumption that could not be left tacit. I clutched his wrist and whispered, “Not lemming: Apis mellifera, the honey bee—particularly the female, or worker, of the species. Hers is a noble suicide. When she gives up her one-and-only sting, she’s a goner. It’s selfsacrifice for the sake of the hive.”
Ashen, no longer so smug, the joker replied, “That is, presuming she knows she’s going to die.”
The expandable metal band was a worthy challenge. It would have been easier with a buckle or clasp. “Bees know. It’s probably a collective superconscience that makes them do it—that’s what the scientists say. Hell, they wittingly rip their little asses in half. Anything to protect the queen.” Shakily, I stood. “Look, pal, it’s been nice talking to you, but I really have to go. That was the boss on the phone. My bus has been called back to the yard.”
He patted my ass. “Taking the TW?”
“It’s the only way to Southie.”
I walked past the guards and out of the bar with a decent counterfeit of an expensive Swiss wristwatch in my pocket. When the King ordered his next drink, I bet he still felt the ghost impression of my grip on his naked wrist.
I lingered ten minutes in the terminal, offering to pay passersby for accompanying me on the quick trip to the Southie yard, but it was no use. I had to get on an empty bus. I was buzzed, and I had to pilot myself alone on this brief excursion that would seem, I could foresee, like a tunnel of infinity. I pulled out my key chain and absently patted my pocket, but the familiar bulge was not there. It took a second, along with the recognition of what it was like to feel blitzed, to realize that, while I had been busy snatching his watch, the creep had lifted my wallet. In my first day of adult life, a flamboyant casino thief had outsped Fast Eddie. Ha! That buffoon had relieved me of the hallmark of my family history, that billfold of Corrente leather. The larcenist’s services had come cheaply, as far as I was concerned. I had his timepiece and he had my wallet, but he had done me a favor by taking that wretched thing. Hopefully he was on his way to enjoying a meal on my last week’s pay, the fruit of maybe a dozen runs up the parkway and through the thruway, runs I would rather forget, anyway. That wallet had been the weight which kept me biting my tongue while lugging old ladies’ bags full of grief and listening to sorry suckers’ war stories about one-armed bandits. What a peculiar sensation overtook me on that, the night of my twenty-first birthday. I had been unburdened of the weight that had kept me bound to Pauly all these years. Pulling out of that parking area, I felt ready for anything. Without a history, I was in the hands of destiny.
The global positioning system told me there were no other cars heading into the Ted Williams tunnel toward Chinatown. I was alone on the narrow, two-mile, monotonous shot under the harbor. Half-consciously, I began accelerating. Eighty. All that would be required was a flick of the switch back to manual and a nudge of the wheel—not even a turn, just a tap. Ninety. Spinning out upon contact with the wall and violently wedging itself sideways inside this narrow tube, the chassis would snap and the body would explode like a five-ton marshmallow entering the earth’s atmosphere from outer space. One hundred miles per hour. Chunks of bus and pieces of me would paint the curved surfaces with strokes of blue flame. “ATTENTION: TUNNEL UNDER VIDEO SURVEILLANCE”—someone would get to appreciate the incendiary display.
I was wrested back to reality when the global positioning system beeped and a blip appeared on the screen. I had company: another vehicle, a heavy one, coming down the TW from the opposite end, a dump truck or possibly a long-bed. I took my foot off the pedal, relieved to no longer be alone with my neurosis, and flicked the citizens’ band on nineteen. Right away came a standard salutation: “Breaker one-nine: Can I get a radio check?” The voice sounded familiar, but maybe it was just because of the generic Southern drawl people assume on CB.
“Ten-four. Got you loud and clear. Over.”
“What’s your handle, partner?”
“Fast Eddie.”
“Fast Eddie the bus driver?”
“That’s a ten-four.”
“What’s your forty?”
“Southbound in the TW. What’s your handle, buddy?”
“This is the King…” That’s when I recognized the voice: It was the same sicko who had harassed me in the bar. Right before I had been bound by my occupation to take a ride through the deserted gauntlet, he had gotten a kick out of telling me his underwhelming theory on self-annihilation, snatched my wallet, and made his getaway through the tunnel. While I dawdled in the terminal, he had decided to turn back and taunt me some more. Now, on the squawk box, he was trying to run me off the road with more moribund logic: “About those bees: You know who runs the hive? The queen. What happens to the drone? After a while, the workers drag him out of the nest, and if he tries to crawl back he gets ripped apart.”
“Sure wish I could stay and chit-chat, King, but you’re breaking up. Over and out.”
I shut the radio off thinking, easy, E, you can shake this. The line of lights on the tunnel walls whizzed by hypnotically and I set the steering on automatic. The GPS screen made me think the system was off kilter, so I gave the dashboard a whack, but the apparition of high-beam headlights confirmed the incredible data. The King was headed right down the middle of the narrow tunnel, as if he had sighted his hood ornament smack on the double line. I honked. I flashed. I sent a distress ping via the collision-avoidance system, but it was no use, the psycho kept speeding towards me in the center of the two-lane death trap. There was no telling what kind of cargo he might be carrying, but as components for a pipe bomb our empty craft alone accounted for more than thirty-thousand pounds of mostly steel and three hundred gallons of volatile fuel. It was a mile behind me to the mouth, I was stuck like a caramel nut cluster right in the pit of the Inner Harbor’s large intestine, and here came a ten-ton enema. Gears grinding, axles shrieking, brakes nevertheless did not squeal.
There was a quarter mile between the speeding juggernaut and my bus and ten seconds left until impact. I went slack in the driver’s seat, blazing headlights blinding my sight. What was it in those shining eyes that seemed to be watching me and watching themselves watching me at the same time? Maybe it was the overriding madness of the King, a suicide in overdrive. Exhilarated, with perhaps a hundred yards to go in this murderous game of chicken, I was awakened to an overwhelming, alien impulse: the will to live. I stomped on the emergency brake and, the coach skidding and kicking up a great plume of vapori
zing rubber, jumped up in my seat and popped the seal on the driver’s emergency window. No! I would not go!—at least not gently.
I dove, rolled, cradled my head against the mammoth blast, and was blown away—right down an uncovered manhole. Weirdly, I did not hit bottom. The walls coddled me, a plummeting Alice, and cushioned my fall. My body came to rest in the oozy abdomen of the under-tunnel. Glasses still sat snug on my nose, but I could not see. In a dumbfounded crouch I kept checking and rechecking myself for injuries, finding none. Was this what it was like to be dead? The kamikaze’s watch pecked at my left wrist, an instantaneous reminder of the intercourse that had just rocked my otherwise imperturbable indifference. The antique timepiece was still ticking off the last time he gave it a wind. I tried the tiny light—it worked. As if in response, right in front of me, a hatch opened onto an unseemly, unsanitary hovel.
The air was redolent with incense whose smoke seemed at once exotic and familiar, the cavern dimly lit by too many monitors flashing fragmented images from every corner. Walls were bathed by a cathode glow. Idols glinted in the unearthly light. In the center of it all loomed a gargantuan she-bulk in Buddha-like pose, meaty hands working some kind of ritual accessory at her lap—dharma balls? prayer beads? At the heart of the eerie tableau, on the apex of the Fury’s lotus, what beamed most bluely beneath a beehive of peroxide locks was a great, round, lunar face, as remote and inviolable as an Indonesian death-mask, features frozen as if in a trance. From what I could tell, her fat, fulsome belly, bulging out of a triple-extralarge Philadelphia Eagles T-shirt, melted into the lion-skincovered couch.
She cried, “Sheeeee-itfuck! Goddamn zombies gone and robbed my high score!” then saw me and said, “Lights! Music!”
The room exploded with a fluorescent ferocity that made me cover my eyes in reflex. Blaring out of unseen amplifiers, old-time hip-hop music of the gangsta variety caused me to shift my monkey-see-no defense to my ears. When finally I could peer squintingly about, a quick glance to the monitor at my back revealed the source of her momentary consternation: GAME OVER. There was no discernible exit. The door had swallowed me up and closed behind me. Whose hideous indignation had I invoked by my inadvertent audience?
“Relax!” said the great diva, nested in the midst of a patch of throw pillows. She had put down her joystick and was occupied with a task on the table between us, fiddling with a see-through cylinder that reminded me of the stein the suicidal maniac had earlier made me chug. “Play a game or two. I’ve got all the best shoot-’em-ups.” With the same, sickly light that had shone on me my first morning in Ho-Ho-Kus, I realized precisely who she was: the Brutus in drag who had masterminded the embargo on Dig City. Man! had I made a wrong turn! My slack jaw must have let leak the awestruck spurt, it’s Spinks, because, bad breath blasting down from her great, huffing exhaust pipe of a mouth, she said, tickling my chin, “Miss Spinks to you.”
I examined the hardware along the dark, dingy walls. The hacker’s hideout, tucked away in an alcove of the TW deep beneath the mud of Inner Harbor, had been the control center for all the central artery tunnels. All of the underground infrastructure linked into here: access, surveillance, drainage, and ventilation. Spinks had decorated her bunker with the kitschiest knick-knacks and pimpiest bits of mid-to-late century 20: lava lamps, black-light posters, rotating disco balls, pink fur upholstery, porcelain puppies with sad, bobbing faces. If it were found by a tacky enough collector, the lot would have fetched a fortune at an antique show.
I got the visceral sense that neither the climate nor the company were so good for my health. “I’m really sorry I burst in on you like this. Can I go now?”
“Not so fast,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “You done trespassed.” Monitors lighted up all over. Yikes! There was my bus on TV. I had been surveilled.
“But it was a mistake. I didn’t mean to bother you.”
She examined the compiled clips. “Hm, it sure does look that way.” The speed, the swerving, the ejection—mercifully, Spinks stopped the replay before the crash. “Tell you what: We’ll play a little game. If you win, I let you go.”
“Please, Miss Spinks.…”
“Aw, cut the sympathy shit,” she interrupted, in a voice that, preternaturally resonant, did not need raising to be heard, and, tilting the barrel of a five-foot-long glass tube in my direction, added, “have a hit.” Spinks packed the bowl at the crux of her cross-legged slouch with a plug of indistinguishable herb. She thrust the water pipe’s weighted base my way, pushing aside the tabletop clutter of ashtrays, half-empty cans, obscure game controllers, and smoking paraphernalia.
“No, thanks. I’m, uh, nice.”
“Go on. You’re going to need it. This game’s a bitch.” As for the chiba, what could I do but draw a deep draught? So far, this invitation had been my only favorable sign.
My eyes began to adjust as the peculiar smoke affected my senses. Attached to Spinks’s mainframe, a double saddle girthed a contraption on a cowish chassis. “Christ!” I cried— something about being high made me invoke odd gods— “it’s a mechanical bull.”
“That, my lass,” Miss Spinks said, effortlessly lifting me off the floor and settling me in the front stock, “is my ass.”
Mounted on the digital donkey, feeling fey and bold from the intoxicating smoke and the seeming ease of our interaction, I had to laugh.
Spinks’s hot breath blasted in my ear: “It may seem funny, Eddie, but it ain’t no joke. If you win, I take a dive. But if you fuck up, I cut your throat.” Spinks raised a steely blade, long and curved. The edge gleamed unmistakably keen, although at the tip its luster was dulled by a brown coat of what might have been rust. How had she known my name? It was enough to make a neurotic with a belly full of beer become downright paranoid, but then white noise came blaring over the sound system and shortly I understood. Spinks had sampled the tunnel video feed as well as my CB exchange with the King. I had to hear it all over again, and queasily I marveled at how I had ever been capable of empathy for such a pretentious death rap. Now that I had narrowly, hairily escaped what might have been my nearest brush with elective death, I found myself in the clutches of a genocidal hacker and fiercely clinging to life.
I was altogether shaken now. “You see, Miss Spinks. That’s why I don’t smoke! I’m prone to paranoia anyway, and—”
“Don’t sweat it, Eddie. Hit start.”
The digital donkey began gently pumping and started over a hilly competition course. From the crown-wearing avatar on the wall-mounted monitor, I understood that I was king, and behind sat my queen, as played by Spinks. Data readouts: miles, lives, jackass points. The power glove on my right hand force-fed back the pressure of a bridle.
By mile five I could feel the beast teething the bit. “Wow,” I said, my stoned guard lowered—I didn’t even know I was speaking out loud, “nice code!”
“I programmed it myself. Wait’ll you hit seven, where the ass starts kicking.” By the time we made it to the ninth mile, the burro was really bucking. Spinks wrapped her elbow around my neck, raised her razor talon to the top of my throat, and spat, “A king and queen ride the jackass ten miles to the throne.”
I almost lost my mount. “I can’t see.” I said, sucking air. Infinitesimally, Spinks loosed the grip.
“It’s a riddle, bitch. Answer it.”
“Oh, man,” I moaned. On the monitor, there appeared in the distance what looked like an ocean liner. It had to be significant, as it was the first thing to show up on the horizon at the actual vanishing point of this tunnel-vision game. A king and queen ride the jackass ten miles to the throne. “A buh- … a buh- … a buh-.…”
“A whuh?”
The sweat streaking down my leg reminded me I had to pee. The basin shape on the monitor had made me think boat, but as it grew larger in the center of the enormous screen it looked more like a conical castle, immaculate white walls spreading outwards as they reached for the sky. A king and queen ride the jackass ten miles to the thr
one. “A cah- … a cah- … a cah- ….”
“Hunh?”
The curved knife pressed at my throat as parapets gleamed like porcelain. Porcelain parapets? Spinks was a better programmer than this. She would have texture-mapped the battlements. And why the funny, infunicular shape? Something about it reminded me of the pants I had just wet. A king and queen ride the jackass ten miles to the throne. “I think I’ve got it—!”
The last thing I saw before passing out: Miss Spinks hulking in the reflection of the monitor, eyes upon me piercingly, raising the razor with a bloodthirsty grimace. GAME OVER.
The ceiling was flickering blue. It must have been from all the empty screens. Where was she? I tried to sit up, but something rigid and cold about my waist barred erection. I kept calm by reminding myself that I was an escape artist: I would likely be able to wrest free, whatever the restraints. While attempting to roll over, I realized that it was no longer a saddle beneath me, but a softer, suppler seat. Wrapped in lion-skin print: the harpy’s magnificent abdomen. The late Miss Spinks held me in her tender, ultimate embrace. I don’t recall whether I raised my voice in protest when the walls came down, but come down they did. A bunch of SWAT-style oddballs burst in and, swarming around the mess, labored to pry me out of Spinks’s mortal grip. As the lights went out a second time for me, I mumbled incoherently, “A royal flush.”
When I came to I was slumped in a white chair in front of a white desk inside a white, windowless box before the whitest man I had ever seen. He wasn’t an albino, just someone who had not gotten any sun for a long, long time. Light came from no perceptible source, glowing perhaps from phosphorous in the paint. I looked around for the hidden camera, which could not be detected, but whose invisible presence I unmistakably, electronically sensed. The walls and ceilings were bare. Far off, there was a sound like a fresh load dropping in the belly of an automatic ice-making machine.
“Who are you?” said the pale interrogator.
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