Even if they had been more attractive in the past than they were now, it was the Here and the Now that Potter dealt with when he visited once a year or gave any thought to them at any time.
But he knew he wouldn't be thinking of them at all if it weren't Post-Wish Week and if he wasn't exhausted from a long day's shift on the city's streets, with the prospect of taking on a night patrol at the border in lieu of sleep.
He popped a sweet, gummy pepper-upper from a plastic vial. Refills from the stationhouse pharmacy came easy at this time of year. Everybody, from the City Commissioner of Police down to the newbie street grunt needed help keeping alert while enduring extra shifts.
"You ready?" some cop in a long brown coat said.
Potter shrugged and shuffled himself into the front passenger seat of the squad car. He didn't know his partner's name. Partner for a day. Day-Guy, he called him. It didn't matter what name he used or what concerned him or consumed him. Potter would work with him today and probably never see him again.
How long before he didn't have to do this?
Exhausted, in spite of the pepper-upper, he lumbered in the general direction of the apartment block where he'd stuffed Ginny. He needed her soft touch and caring words and invigorating caress. If he went home to his wife, he'd face a barrage of complaints. Lydia never had anything good to say when he walked into the house.
But Ginny had bad news. Which he didn't want to face on an empty stomach, mind reeling from too much noise and too many arrests and too little of a take. A few ogre coins? Jewelry? Some drugs? Good thing Day-Guy turned away and pretended he didn't see anything, else Potter would have to split the haul.
He wanted to tell Ginny all about this. About Day-Guy's condemning glare; the need to take a night patrol in spite of being on all day and with only a short six hours off to recuperate. He wanted to complain, even if he heard his father's voice in the back of his head admonishing him not to whine because things could always be worse.
"We got a problem," Ginny said. Whining.
"We? You got a problem. What makes it mine?"
She pulled her All-Pod from where it sat face-down on the table. A slow and laborious movement of her slender arm, her yellow tinted nightgown clinging to her side when she half-turned away.
Ginny held up the Pod's screen for Potter to see. He stepped towards her, despite his reluctance to face bad news. When he saw the printed notice, the first line in large type that spanned the landscape oriented screen, he felt something inside himself go limp.
"When did this come in?" he asked, and grabbed the All-Pod from Ginny's hand. He read the message -- the first screen only, not needing to scroll through the rest to know what it said.
"This morning," Ginny said, head bowed, her round chin digging into the crook of her arm, her lank blonde hair falling across the side of her face.
"And you've been lying around in that nightgown all day?" Potter yanked her arm. The chair squeaked when it moved, but Ginny didn't rise to her feet. Nor did she fall to the floor. She continued to sit.
"Whatcha expect me to do, Kyle?" Ginny groaned.
Potter avoided giving an immediate answer by pretending to read the All-Pod message again. The office cleaning job he'd arranged for Ginny more than a year ago would be eliminated at the end of the week. She'd no longer be employed. And that meant she'd no longer be eligible to live in the city.
"I need a new job," she said.
Potter shook his head. The job -- the one the municipality had cancelled -- didn't even exist. Ginny never went to work. Potter had arranged the phantom employment as a ruse. It kept Ginny where he wanted her, in a one-room apartment paid for by a salary she earned from a job she never worked.
A perfect setup, he'd always thought.
"What're you going to do about this?" Ginny asked, and turned in her chair to face him, her round cheeks damp and her soft green eyes red-rimmed, her long fingers fluttering in her lap.
Potter lifted her to her feet. "I'll fix it," he said.
"When? I'm fired as of the day after tomorrow. Then just three days after that before my residency permit expires." Ginny snorted, as though something funny crossed her mind. "Who knows, maybe you'll be on escort duty when they throw me out of the city."
#
Potter lied to his wife so he could spend the rest of the day with Ginny. Partly to comfort her. Partly to enjoy her company because she might not be there for him in a week.
That night, he went on border patrol, cruising alongside the city-side of the wall and stopping at known weak spots -- manholes over tunnels to the outside, unused gates that could be cut with a blow torch, shanties built alongside the wall where smugglers might hide a hole punched in the cinder blocks.
In the morning, when he should have been heading home to sleep and refresh for another afternoon stint on WISH patrol, Potter took another pepper-upper and drove to City Center in a squad wheelie. The tricycle sported two huge front wheels with individual loose suspension and roll bars above the driver's cockpit. An ideal vehicle for chasing culprits through city streets, up and down staircases between street levels, and across the wide plazas and through shallow fountains.
Office workers streamed up from the subway, across the flagstones fronting a tall glass-and-steel building, and swarmed the lobby. They looked so confidant, so sure of themselves, so secure in their positions, their status. Potter snarled as he parked at a monitoring station. Any one of the passing workers could be reduced to a shadow of their self, turned into an insignificant blip on the city's registry. So easily wiped out. As Ginny would be.
Potter's fears for Ginny sent every other thought out of his head, including the more pleasant ideas he harbored about how easy it would be to get even with the world by ruining one of the passing workers' life.
He gave the cop in the monitoring station a "Back in five" hand signal. The face that nodded back at him was young, as Potter had been when he first joined the force. And, like that youth, Potter spent many boring days monitoring a bank of video screens in this exclusive, high-rent district. Where Ginny lived, there were no cameras to keep tabs on the streets.
Potter crossed the plaza and headed for a cluster of five cloud-reaching buildings known as City Center Plaza, his sights on the middle one. He pushed past the stream of men and women filing through the revolving doors into the lobby. The guards at the desk turned towards him. He tapped the oval badge above his left breast pocket and they nodded in unison. Private security never interfered with municipal police. Potter liked it when he got some rent-a-cop fired for getting in his way. They deserved it for trying to be more important than they were.
Potter stepped into an empty elevator car and held up both hands to warn everyone away. Heads down like meek sheep accepting the edicts of their shepherd, the herd of workers complied and stepped back. He knew what they thought. He remembered being a kid and watching teams of cops scour the building where he lived. So long as they didn't bang on his door or take him and his friends and family into a corner for questioning, he didn't care where they went or what they did. So long as he or his dad weren't the victims, the cops could go wherever they pleased.
At the fifteenth floor, Potter alighted from the elevator. The woman at reception glared at him.
Potter nodded in the direction of a closed door with the name plate reading Clarkson across the top. "He in?"
"You got an appointment?"
He searched the woman's dark eyes for a hint of fear. He saw a hard face rift with wrinkles, the lips chapped and the skin pock-marked from a case of teenager acne. The last time Potter saw the receptionist, she'd been more accommodating, offering him coffee-and, the "and" being any one of a dozen pastries kept on a table in the corner of this outer room. The last time Potter came here, he came with a bit more patience. He needed a favor and he had something to trade.
He still needed a favor. He still had things to trade. But he didn't have time to finesse this middle-aged guardian who thought she had the
power to stall him.
"I got no appointment," Potter growled. He turned to the office door. Locked. He looked back at the receptionist, who stood now, hands on the edge of her desk.
"He's busy, officer."
"If I scan you," Potter said, and pulled out his police All-Pod, "I might find something that you don't want me to know."
"I'm legal, sir."
"But that can change."
The receptionist turned to the monitor at the other side of her desk. "You've an unscheduled visitor," she said to the screen.
Potter didn't hear the reply. Most likely, the intercom-app was on text output. He did hear the door lock unlatch.
"Good choice," he said to the receptionist, and wondered what secret she kept hidden that he could've used to terminate her employment. Too many luxury items in her apartment? Was she a hoarder? Did she live a lot better than she should? Far better than her salary allowed?
Considering that she worked for Rick Clarkson, Potter didn't doubt that the woman had something to hide.
"You threatening my girl?" Clarkson said when Potter entered his office.
"You still in business?" Potter said. He gestured at the spacious room. "Not the environmental kind that my taxes pay you for, but the other kind."
Clarkson pushed back from his glass-and-steel desk, hands clasped across the buttons of his gray vest. Athletic and tall, still muscular and fit at the age of 60, Clarkson exuded confidence and a faux-youth that Potter found irritating.
"Don't get up," Potter said when Clarkson started to stand. "Sit there and listen." If Clarkson stood, the differences between them would be too apparent. The chubby cop with a fringe of curly soon-to-be-gray hair around an otherwise bald head facing off against the robust, tanned governmental executive.
With Clarkson sitting, Potter felt on a level playing field. He still had something Clarkson needed and he couldn't be intimidated by the man's physical presence.
"Okay, Potter. What is it? You never come here unless you need something."
Potter grinned. "What do you need, Rick? Huh? Still amassing a bit of a personal fortune smuggling for the Grand Bazaar? Working for Jake Stern?" Potter liked the flash of fear he saw in Clarkson's light blue eyes. The underground market -- the Grand Bazaar -- thrived because of men like this executive. Men that Stern had in his back pocket.
"What happen?" Clarkson asked in a weary voice. "Somebody forget to pay you?"
Potter shook his head. "Ginny lost her job. It's not even a real job. It's the office cleaning job you arranged for her. She's been fired and now she'll get tossed out of the city. What's going on, Clarkson? You told me she'd be secure for life."
Clarkson tapped the sunken keyboard in his desk.
"You paying attention to me?" Potter snapped.
"I'm pulling up a file," Clarkson muttered with a head-shake of annoyance. "Okay. Her building's been closed. Everybody -- that's more than 1500 people -- are out of work. Or will be on Closing Day. So she's not so special, Potter."
She is to me, Potter thought. "How many buildings are shutting down?"
"Three."
Could be close to five thousand newly unemployed citizens, all of them angry or scared or both. Closing Day riots loomed. On top of the extra duty because of WISH, Potter knew he had mob control to look forward to.
"Your people are going to capitalize, I assume," Potter said.
Clarkson smuggled mostly luxury goods stolen from the robot-controlled factories ringing the city. Even the lowliest street cleaner -- a job requiring hours of following an automated sweeper and picking up debris it missed -- could have a miniature washer and dryer in his tiny apartment.
"I don't do people," Clarkson said, eyes wide, face shining. Potter didn't believe him. Five thousand newly displaced persons was an attractive opportunity.
"Guess your twerk-buddy," Clarkson said, "isn't the only new fish on the loose."
Potter let the insult go. Besides, it was true. Ginny was just somebody to keep him happy t night. "Can you get her a new job?"
"She may have to work. Really work. It won't be a phantom job like I got her before."
If she wants to stay in the city, Potter thought, she'll work. She'd prefer that to being tossed outside the wall, where she'd join the nomads scouring the countryside for food and shelter.
#
Ginny balked.
"I ain't worked in years," she said, a glum look on her face. "What kind of job?" she asked after a few moments of silence, her hand wringing reflecting worry. Potter knew her history. She'd gone from a comfortable childhood to a young-adulthood fraught with the dangers of not having a profession on which to rely. She was a student when Potter found her last year. A frightened young woman on the verge of graduation.
"I don't know what kind of job he'll get you," Potter said in answer to her question. Considering the price Clarkson demanded, it had better be a good one, with a high salary and few weekly hours. Potter calculated he'd lose more than five hundred ogres letting Clarkson's smugglers through without paying a toll. He might lose even more if he, Potter, had to pay off his erstwhile accomplices because they wouldn't like losing out on his behalf.
"Maybe it ain't so bad out there," Ginny said, her voice more high-pitched than usual. She suddenly looked hopeful. "Outside. On the other side of the wall."
"Winter'll be here soon. You could get on a body-recovery detail. Haul frozen moms and tots out of the snow. Drag them to the incinerators just ahead of a pack of hungry people ready to chop off an arm or a leg to eat for themselves."
Ginny paled. "It ain't that bad," she murmured.
"You take whatever job he gets you," Potter seethed, half angry with himself for scaring the girl.
She nodded a few times. Her thin body trembled. She put her arms on the tabletop, each hand clasping the opposite elbow, and lowered her head onto this makeshift pillow.
"I have to go home," Potter said. He needed a long hot shower. Hotter than the water he'd find in Ginny's apartment house communal showers. And longer, too. No countdown clock to watch. No warning buzzer announcing the last 20 seconds, which meant he'd better rinse off if he didn't want soap suds clinging to his body.
"Stay a bit longer?"
Potter sighed. He needed a night's sleep. Tomorrow he faced the prospect of a long daytime patrol -- his last for WISH week -- and then another night on the city's border. With riot control looming in another two days, he'd be too worn out to enjoy Ginny's renewed lease on life, which he knew she'd celebrate with whatever feast he procured for them from his treasure trove of ogres.
A treasure stored at home. All the more reason to leave now. He'd need the physical tokens in his pocket when he went to the Grand Bazaar. The taste of tangy cheese newly sliced from a sticky wedge, along with the tart touch of dark red wine at the tip of his tongue, toyed with him. He salivated with the memory of the last time he and Ginny enjoyed a feast. What did they celebrate that time? He didn't recall.
"I'll check with you tomorrow," Potter said. "I'll make sure the job comes through."
"What if it doesn't?"
Potter smiled, held his arms wide. "Would I disappoint you?" He told himself he could trust Clarkson, that someone with hiring ability was in Clarkson's debt.
The apartment door vibrated from the force of three quick raps of a fist. A voice announced from the hallway, "Building security."
Potter pulled open the door and the uniformed officer in the corridor stepped backwards, far enough that he bumped into the opposing wall. His sad eyes flickered. He touched the end of his chin. Potter glared at him.
"There's an eviction notice for this apartment," the security officer said. "I didn't call for the police, though. Not effective until after the weekend. But I have to serve the notice. Okay?"
Without showing any visible sign of relief, Potter took the officer's view-slate and gave it to Ginny. For a moment, he'd been afraid there'd been some glitch in the process, which would put Ginny on the street and in d
anger of exile even though she officially had time to rearrange her life.
"Do I sign it?" she asked Potter.
"Yeah. Go ahead. When you get that new job, you might qualify for better quarters."
The security officer laughed. "Nothing wrong with these digs. I been living here for twenty years."
Ginny signed with a fingertip scrawl. Potter shoved the view-slate back at the officer. He shut the door.
"What now?" Ginny asked.
"Haven't you ever been through an eviction?"
She shook her head.
Potter grinned. So naive. So young and unprepared. As a child, he'd been forced to move many times. Often onto the street, where his dad dodged police patrols until he renewed his visa by finding a new job. Once, they enjoyed an off-the-record stint together as laborers at a warehouse adjacent to the Grand Bazaar's underground entrance. Mom scrounged for leftover food and maintained a small tent for the family in a section of the city designated for the homeless. So long as the elder Potter didn't get picked up, they had a home.
Somehow -- and Potter couldn't remember the details -- his father found a legit-job which came with a work permit and a renewed residency visa. That led to a two-room house in a quiet neighborhood of tiny well-kept lawns and friendly local security squads. Much like where Potter lived now.
"Why can't you stay longer?" Ginny said.
The whine in her voice grated on him. "You'll be fine. I'll check back on you. Tomorrow."
"I'm scared," she said.
"Don't be." He didn't know what else he should say. I'll take care of you? I've got it all wrapped up. Don't worry.
#
Lydia lounged on a short couch in the spacious living room. Potter stopped at the doorway to his house and looked at her for a few seconds, observed her. In their twenty years of marriage she'd gone from meek and mousy young woman to confident middle-aged house mate. The brown-eyed beauty he'd discovered years earlier was still dark and sultry, but her light chocolate skin now clung tight and smooth to her short legs, without a hint of blemish; and her cheeks shone with whatever expensive lotion she'd chosen this particular day.
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