by Nisi Shawl
Federico looks down at his chalice, swirls his finger in the remains of southern New Zealand’s ice cap.
In the break in their conversation, they hear the sound of the multitude trying to find its voice.
“What do we do?” he asks. “People love him.”
She tries to imagine those people. She tries to answer his question. She remembers she had an idea about this, but she can’t remember what it was.
“I think I’m going to find another piece to play in,” says Federico. “See you around?”
Bye.
◊
Eden does dervish as the sun disappears and the energy accelerates with the cool. She’s in the main set, which ends up all beat and no trance. She dances with the silhouette of the trees behind the fenceline, and the power line towers marching off through the volunteer foliage of the right of way like giant stick figure robots.
She tries to influence the crowd with strong rhythms from deep inside. Jungle drums, like from an old movie, like they are going to war.
La Sirena te llame.
◊
When her friends want to go to an after party, Eden takes a carshare back to the place.
She finds the book Billy was reading. Picks it up and gives it a try. Starts in the middle. Jumps to the end. Which is also beginning. Realizes she has been reading the same three pages over and over again for more than an hour.
The text burns its way in, even as you don’t think you understand it. A different kind of code, for soft machines.
◊
Eden wakes up in the night. The noise of metal gears grinding against lube.
She has been dreaming about men with jungle fatigues and balaclavas occupying the ruins of downtown. She can’t tell if they are soldiers or insurgents.
Maybe what she is really remembering is the things she saw in that long year after she dropped out. Crossed over. Got in trouble. Before Mom intervened and hooked her up with this job.
The weird smell is what gets her out of bed.
In the kitchen, one of the 3-D printers is laying down goop on the build plate. Creamy brown, with flushes of blue. It looks wet.
It sounds like a regular printer, the way the carriages move. Crossed with a squirt bottle.
Eden makes the noise.
“What are you doing?” asks a voice standing in the doorway. Finn.
“Wondering what woke me up,” says Eden.
“Oh shit, sorry,” says Finn. “Didn’t know you could hear it way over there. Want a beer?”
Sure.
Billy is out there with Finn, on the back porch.
The river is there down below, lit up like a black mirror by moonlight and light pollution.
She hears a cacophony of frogs, cars going over the bridge, horny night birds calling to each other, a low-flying helicopter.
“How was your festival?” asks Billy. His cigarette smoke moves slowly through the muggy air, trapped in the light from the candle.
“Gimme one of those?” says Eden.
“Sure,” says Billy.
The cigarette is strong. Eden feels clear.
“Festival was cool,” says Eden, exhaling a cloud. “Everything else was kind of fucked up.”
“That’s that interactive stuff, huh,” says Billy.
Eden nods.
“I don’t get that.”
“You’re too old,” says Eden.
Finn laughs.
“Seriously,” she says. “Your brain has to be open to the software. Which means the tones. They work like code.”
“I already hacked my brain pretty good,” says Billy. “I’ll leave that to you.”
“They’re probably inserting commercials into your head,” says Finn.
“I’m sure they’re trying,” says Eden. “That’s what Nick does.”
“No thanks,” says Finn.
“So what do you guys do? Sit around printing jizz all night?”
They both laugh.
“Seriously,” says Eden.
“Research,” says Finn.
“Research?” says Eden.
Finn nods.
“What?” says Eden.
“All kinds of stuff,” says Finn.
Eden laughs.
“Seein what we can make with those machines,” says Billy. “It’s pretty cool.”
“You can print guns, right?”
“Lot more interesting things than that,” says Finn.
“I want to print a gun,” says Eden.
“First you gotta design one,” says Billy.
“Come on,” says Eden.
And so they do. Finn’s laptop has a metal case, DIY, covered in stickers. Yes, he makes his money working on cars. He shows her how you find the download sites, through a series of mirrors. Shows her the illegal freeware you use to anonymize your browsing from the eyes of the state. Air drops her a copy.
On her phone, she trolls through screens of seditious objects.
There’s a lot more than guns.
“What about this?” asks Eden.
◊
While the machine lays down the render, Billy works on his model. He holds down the butcher paper with his clay ashtray. The cigarette burns on its own while he puts the pieces together. They make a frame of interlocking tubes printed from a bad copy of the bones of bats. He spreads out the pericardium across the wingtips, and leaves it to dry.
When Eden uses the bathroom by the kitchen, there is a piece of tissue floating in the toilet. It does not look like a wing. It looks like a used pocket, made from the inside of skin, trailing ropy threads.
◊
The sun comes up through the ozone, bringing birdsong and ailerons.
They walk down to the river for a proper test flight. Eden carries her new tool in her pocket. Stops and holds it up to the light to see its inner structure. Finn carries the beer.
The hill is steep, through dense foliage. They walk under a canopy of scraggly elms crowded with cackling black birds.
She sees an old mattress in a small clearing.
The beach is made of trash, and rocks.
She goes in anyway, leaving her pants and her tool on the shore.
The water is warm by the shore. It smells like dead plants and sick fish.
Eden goes all the way in, swimming out, into dark cool. She comes up, current carried downriver. There is a big pipe embedded into the rocky bed. She stands on it. Salute to an exploding sun.
There are holes in the sky, big enough for old gods to sneak back in.
Cliff swallows swirl around her head, buzzing the hydroplaning bugs before they can become fish food. She saw their nests the day before, beautiful pustules of dried mud growing out of the steel spans of the bridge.
The bridge was built when capitalism collapsed, by a legion of lost men, while they incubated the war machine that ate them all. Nick told them that, when they drove over. Not in those words. 1933, he said.
Over there, upriver, the old hippie is running after his gossamer batplane, and the motorhead host is removing his clothes.
She keeps swimming, away, into a dream of cities under water.
◊
“Is that a beer?” asks Shannon.
Eden drinks from it, and nods.
“It’s 9:42 a.m. Sunday morning,” says Nick, in that practicing to be paternal tone.
“Where were you?” says Shannon. “We’re waiting to go to brunch.”
All four of them are sitting there, on their laptops.
“Did you lose your phone?” says Nick.
“I’m fucking hungry,” says Honda. “Let’s go.”
“Sorry,” says Eden. “Do I have time to shower?”
No.
◊
They brunch at the shopping center called Zona.
Zona is an old one-story mall that died, lived a second life as an immigrant market with a dance studio, died again, and was reborn as this curated gallery of eclectic fetish objects. The anchor is a store called Stan that speci
alizes in vintage televisions. No one is sending any signals that the sets can receive anymore, but Stan sells little boxes that repurpose them as displays for contemporary devices, channeled through retro filters.
Eden watches a yellow star explode against a saturated red sky on one of the sets while she drinks her michelada in the courtyard of Bishop’s across the hall. On her phone she types a four hundred-word piece for the magazine about the eyes of Beltran and the bodyguards of Texas. There’s only so much muck the advertisers will let you rake.
Who knew jalapeño waffles would be so good.
Syrup makes everything good, says Honda. She’s right.
The skylight over the courtyard caved in when the mall was abandoned, and they left it that way. Feral. Nick and Marley are making out in the grass, mood improved by bacon and weed. Honda and Shannon come back with bounty. An old mixing board, a porcelain figurine of a cowgirl with alien eyes, and a pineapple grenade.
Eden takes hold of the grenade. A dummy, with the paint chipped off. Heavy. She wonders what a real one would feel like.
The eye of the satellite watches through the aperture in the ceiling. They say they can see around corners.
Eden shows Honda and Shannon her tool. Asks if they can tell what it is.
They tell her she smells like the river.
◊
Shannon wants to go to the museum before they go swimming, and so they do. There is an exhibit commemorating the tenth anniversary of the attacks. Eden looks at the photographs of the White House in flames, and wonders what it would be like if they had finished the job.
◊
That night Eden dreams of the riot in New York, when they looted the private stores on Fifth Avenue, the ones you need an invitation to shop. An invitation from an algorithm.
When she sees Finn in the kitchen in the morning and he says you look tired she does not tell him about the dream, or the boy she was with, or what he looked like after the corporate security teams came in with their trucks and sonics and retook their masters’ block.
“I can sleep on the plane,” she says.
He asks about the show they went to see. She tells him she skipped it. Went to bed early, not that it did any good.
He tells her he was out all night, because Billy got arrested. They caught him stealing at the hospital. In a lab, behind security. He found an access badge on the fucking street.
He asks when her flight is, she says five, he says then why don’t you go back to bed, she says ‘cause her friends have to leave in an hour. He says I’ll give you a ride and she says ok.
She says why don’t we get some towels and take a nap on the beach.
◊
When she imagined Finn he was like one of those shirtless jeans models, the ones with no heads. But after they had done some time. Then she imagined a whole catalog like that, selling pre-distressed rebel fashions. J. Prep goes to the Supermax. Political detainees in torn denim and faded black cotton. Lean young revolutionary hunger strikers showing off their prison tats and the places where you can see the bones of their hips pushing against the skin of their hairless abs.
Turns out Finn is not like that. Has a bit of a muffin top, in fact. Must be all the beer.
There are a pair of freaky looking blue birds buzzing up and down the river. Giant-beaked heads almost as big as the rest of their bodies. Their clickety-clack calls sound like a pair of old movie projectors taking turns. They fly in spurts. Then they dive for food, straight down, living missiles.
Eden eats a cactus and sausage taco and works on her tan. She washes the salsa down with a cold can of Nicaraguan beer.
She drifts into napland. When she wakes up she can’t even remember where she is, until she sees him down there by the water making a cairn out of river rocks. She watches him clandestinely, pretending to still be asleep.
He comes back over when he sees her sitting up, eating another taco. Opens two more beers, breaks out the weed. She wonders why they always have to make the glass pipes in that shape.
They talk forever. Talk about riots and fake elections and 3-D printers and kingfishers and the way egrets vogue. They talk about AWOL parents and custom cars and dead stars. They try to see if they can imitate the sounds of the birds and the bugs. They talk about the metal piece woven into Finn’s hair, equine gentrification, net censorship, consensual surveillance, old relationships, Eden’s tattoo, petroleum meadows, the names of the trees, and things they would die for.
They fuck on the beach, under the hottest sun Eden can remember.
She hears the jets, wonders if any of the incoming passengers can see them. Imagine that.
She wonders if any other eyes in the sky are watching them. Of course they are.
After, Eden swims out. Feels the hairy leaves of water plants. She swims out farther, into the channel, where the current is faster, looking for clean.
She watches Finn toss the spent rubber into the water.
I guess it’s time to go.
◊
Ambient government.
Eden did not invent that phrase.
It’s when the sensorial presences of the state are so ubiquitously and subtly embedded into the environment that they are almost indistinguishable from nature.
“It takes us back to our roots,” says Beltran. “America is a big small town. Where everybody knows your name.” And everything else.
Eden can’t decide which is better. To work on new strategies to evade the gaze, or more effective ways to poke it in the eye.
Did you know that seventy-five percent of the price of a home-use brick of dispensary marijuana goes to the federal government? They like you that way.
Forty-seven percent of that pays for guns and ammo, thirty-four percent for monitoring, and the rest for productivity rehab.
◊
Eden persuades Finn to stop at the Airport Hilton for a drink before she leaves. She tries to explain to him how it reminded her of a movie she saw, but he doesn’t get it.
The building is structured like a circular fort. The bar is in the middle of the big atrium, under the skylight. You can see a gangway up there.
She asks the bartender how you access that view.
“You can’t,” he says. “Sealed off.”
“This place is messed up,” says Finn.
“It used to be the command center,” says the bartender. “Back when this was an Air Force base.”
Eden looks around, past the self-medicating software salesmen. Imagines men in uniforms the color of black and white movies, peacocking Spartans with silver wings and spiky hair.
“What did they fly?” asks Finn.
“B-52s,” says the bartender. His name tag says Gary. “Southern command.”
“So they could bomb Mexico or something?” asks Eden.
“I guess,” says the bartender. “Who knows? It was the Cold War. There’s a display about it in the airport terminal.”
“Nuclear bombers,” says Eden.
“Where’s the bomb shelter?” asks Finn.
“Dude,” says the bartender. “This whole place is a bomb shelter. There were all kinds of tunnels and stuff. They filled them with concrete when they built the terminal.”
“Yeah, right,” says Eden. “That’s where they keep the people they pull out of the security line.”
Gary the bartender gives her a look. He has the lapel pin by his name tag. The red owl.
“Are you enforcing the Constitution, Gary?” asks Eden.
Gary looks at Finn. Finn smiles.
Eden looks to see where Gary conceals his handgun. Maybe that’s it, under the apron. She imagines taking it from him.
Gary prints out their bill, pushes it in front of Finn, walks to the other end of the bar.
Eden looks at the colored cocktail Gary made her. I’ll have a Wild Blue Yonder, Gary.
“Come on,” she says.
Off we go.
◊
They roam the hotel, looking for hidden doors to secret c
hambers.
They try to get up onto the gangway, but find only circular hallways of identical numbered doors. The design palette is red and beige.
They try out different doors.
They find a room where the door is propped open. They go in. Eden grabs the Bible from the drawer, starts reading out loud, then tries it backwards. Finn turns on the porn channel. Eden raids the minibar. Opens the half champagne. Lights a cigarette.
They end up in the bed. You can smell the dude that slept there the night before. Eden tears off the sheets. Switches the TV to the war channel and cranks up the volume. Puts her plastic lighter to the bedspread, but it only melts.
Eden says hi to a guy that walks past the open door, pulling the suitcase out of which he lives.
When the housekeeper comes in, they are abusing the armchair. You can hear the sound of the helicopter crew talking man code in machine voice, before the fifty-cal. rips at the van. Eden is yelling at the TV, and then at the housekeeper, telling her in Spanish to leave their room.
They sprint down the circular hallway, Eden carrying her shoes in her hand, Finn chasing behind her.
They push open the emergency exit door. No alarm goes off. The warnings are all lies.
They find the basement. There is an old civil defense sign on the wall. You can see where the blast door is, metal, painted grey, a long time ago. The decals and stencils are no longer legible.
Eden pounds on the door, with her shoes, then her fists. You can hear the echo on the other side.
Finn wants to finish what they started in the room. She pushes him back, sits down, looks at the security camera hanging there from the ceiling. Thinks about the movie about the captured aliens. Gives them an Oscar clip.
◊
Eden misses her flight. They do not go to the airport.
They drive, south. Finn says he wants to show her something. Something she can write a story about.
She will email her editor tomorrow. It’s not like she has a desk to go to. They pay her for words.
When Eden wakes up, they are in the desert. On a two-lane highway, no other cars in sight.
The radio plays some chilango rap about perros and oro. She can make out about half the words.
“Where are we?”
“Mexico,” says Finn.
She sits up. Feels the blood drain. “Fuck! I don’t have a passport.”