Frowning, Carlo shook his head. “CCI created the mannequins and should reap the benefits.”
Elad sat back in his seat and crunched almonds. “Carlo Burgacci, will you help us bring an end to Corpus Chrome, Incorporated’s monopoly?”
“No.” The crystal cylinder that was nestled within the miniature white metropolis turned blue.
“Perhaps the slug will prove more persuasive than I,” said the interrogator, sliding the verispectragram to the far side of the table.
From behind the one-way glass, Alicia watched the doctor in white lift the blue tarp. Underneath the fabric was a nude man who had been tied down to the gurney rails by his own boneless arms and legs. Artificially elongated optic nerves ran from his grossly swollen purple eyelids to his eyeballs, which floated in a jar of amber fluid that sat upon his stomach. Exposed to light, the mutilated man’s pupils narrowed.
Not since the death of her family had Alicia seen anything so repugnant. Her heart hammered.
Carlo Burgacci vomited upon himself, spattering the jar that contained the slug’s eyeballs.
Alicia grew dizzy. Sweat ran down her face and nausea twisted her guts, but she did not look away.
“The slug is an example of an uncooperative person,” said Elad, sliding the verispectragram in front of the soiled captive. “Carlo Burgacci, will you help us bring an end to Corpus Chrome, Incorporated’s monopoly?”
Into the cilia-covered sphere, the captive said, “I—I will. I’ll do whatever I can. Yes.”
The crystal on the verispectragram shone blue.
Claiming the bowl of legumes, the Israeli American stood up and left the room.
Carlo Burgacci wept.
Upon the gurney, the slug moaned.
Chapter VIII
Within the Brindled Light
of the Glowing Cat
Awake for twenty-eight hours, Alicia Martinez put her fingertips to the façade placard, dialed her code, entered the building, walked through the brownstone atop which her Brooklyn City skyscraper had been built, reached the lobby that was the original building’s roof, glanced at the white cockatoos in the coop, ascended to floor number seventeen, strode up the hallway, passed the scruffy neighbor who wandered the hall like a nomad, yawned, pressed her fingerprints, dialed her code and transcended the living wall, entering the apartment wherein her family had been murdered before her eyes. There, the widow strode to the living-room window (beyond which glowed two sunlit buildings), closed the curtain, sat, pulled foam rubber boots from her feet, whistled a C-sharp, said “Loop: sleeping cat,” and lay upon the couch. A life-sized Persian feline was sculpted by three hundred thousand pixels upon the stage of the mote aquarium that she had given to her husband on their fifth wedding anniversary.
Exhausted, Alicia pulled a blanket that she had kept since childhood over her clothed body and shut her eyes. The cat’s purrs were like velvet upon her aching muscles.
She tried not to think about the slug.
* * *
Twelve hours later and sticky with pungent sweat, Alicia awakened in darkness, lying upon the sofa that had been her bed since the demise of her family. The widow sat up and arched her back, cracking joints, and a terrible taste filled her mouth.
Her nightmare had been a very disturbing elaboration of her waking life, and she was rattled. She looked around her apartment and, by the brindled light of the glowing cat, saw very little. The shadows were impossibly heavy and the sliver of night beyond the closed curtains was a black swatch, excepting two tiny blue rectangles that were windows in the adjacent building. Society was asleep, and Alicia was awake.
She tried not to think about the slug.
The widow rose from the couch, stepped—and nearly tripped—upon her boots and walked over to the wall, her hands out like a blind person’s as she reached for the panel. Inside her mind, she saw her husband’s and daughter’s collapsed skulls, a ruptured squid, Carlo Burgacci waiting for her with a gun, the slug, Elad’s eyebrows and the ancient face of Mrs. Dulande. The switch clicked, and ice lights glared, chasing away the images and revealing an empty apartment.
She double-tapped her lily and said, “Search: Chinese restaurant; open now; delivers to home.” A moment later, the line began to ring.
* * *
Alicia Martinez sat on the plasticore floor of the kitchen where her family had been murdered and attempted to eat pork egg foo young. The mucoidal meal suggested too many visual horrors to her, and she was unable to eat it.
She tried not to think about the slug.
Twenty minutes later, the widow ate white rice with soy sauce and listened to the messages in her lily vault. Morton Goldman had called to extend an invitation to “catch up” whenever she was so inclined (and also to make sure that she was getting her severance deposits); her mother had called; her father had called (“concerned”); Saul and Werner (her would-be partners in the case against Derrick W.R. Dulande) had called; and a friend from college whom Alicia had outgrown before senior year had called to offer her condolences, months after the fact.
After these transmissions from the world of families, laws, jobs and social lunches was a message from Elad in which the Israeli American said, in a digitally altered voice, “I checked your messages. Be sure to respond to all of the people who have contacted you. Isolation makes people suspicious.” Crunching a nut, he ended the connection.
Tomorrow afternoon she would return the calls. To these people she would detail an anecdote of a mild sickness overcome, and perhaps flavor it with a technical difficulty that had plagued her lily. Those who inhabited the world of families, laws, jobs and social lunches were not owed the truth.
She looked at the fortune cookie in the bottom of the bag, and to it said, “Fuck off.”
Alone and unable to do otherwise, Alicia Martinez thought about the slug.
The mutilated man was evidence of sadistic psychoses, and was a far fouler deed than killing an already-executed murderer or kidnapping an executive.
Alone and unable to do otherwise, Alicia Martinez thought about the brief exchange that she had overheard immediately after the interrogation.
As the pawns were leaving the observation room, the female had asked the androgyne, “Can Elad really take CCI?”
“He has studied the work of Nicolai Dhanikov.”
There had been admiration in the androgyne’s voice as he or she uttered the name of the man who had destroyed the Empire State Building.
* * *
The widow tried to distract herself with fiction.
She selected and watched a silly mote aquarium experience about a rocket blasting off from some fake world that was surrounded by gelatin and water. At the end of this idiotic fantasy, she had wept hysterically.
Alicia then put the cat on the stage, shut off the ice lights and lay upon the sofa. Darkness and the purrs of the pixel-sculpted feline were her companions.
The widow dreamt of the Empire State Building and the Corpus Chrome, Incorporated Building. Both buildings were ablaze within the blackened landscape of an abandoned Heaven.
Chapter IX
Guys: A Thesis Statement
“Wait a second.”
Champ Sappline sneezed upon the brightlamp-illuminated sidewalk. Sniffling, he righted himself from the constellation that he had just created, locked a nozzle to the canister wherein liquefied garbage crackled, walked to the rear of the truck and turned on the straw. The truck sucked.
“What were you about to say?” Champ asked Candace through his lily.
“I’m happy for you,” his ex-wife responded, “but you don’t need to give me updates on everyth—”
“But this is major news,” defended the garbage man. “It seemed like something you should know. They re-bodied my father
. That’s big news.”
“I’m in Thailand with Alan.”
“You guys gypsies?”
“This is only the third trip we’ve taken since we—” Candace stopped herself abruptly.
“Since what?” In the silence that followed, Champ heard a male voice mumble something. “Are you guys married? Did you get married to Alan and not even tell me?”
“Champ. I’m happy that you have your father again, but I shouldn’t be the one you call about significant events in your life at this point.”
“Don’t make it sound like I’m pestering you all the time. I haven’t called you in more than a month. It’s just…you know…we were together for so long. Fourteen years. I thought there was a friendship, too. With us.”
“When you’ve moved on with your life—maybe found somebody else—we might learn how to have a friendship.”
“Thanks, counselor.” Champ unlocked the nozzle and shoved it back into the truck. “‘When you no longer want to talk to me…talk to me.’ What is that? Existentialism? Buddhism? Seems like you’re spending too much time in Asia.”
The man on the other end said something unintelligible, his basso voice rumbling like a motorcycle engine.
“I think you should stop calling me for a while,” said Candace.
“How long? A couple of months?” Silence filled Champ’s ear, and he felt as if he were physically shrinking. “Longer?”
Candace replied, “I suggest that we check in with each other in about a year.”
“Let’s try two. Eons.” The garbage man cut the connection, grumbled and climbed into the vehicle behind the driver.
Mikek surveyed the bugview and accelerated directly in front of a ladybug. The oncoming vehicle veered to avoid hitting the much larger, harder truck.
“I get testy sometimes,” explained the driver.
Champ did not respond.
The rolling weapon that Mikek also employed to freight liquefied garbage sped along Fulton Street. The plump fellow dragged on his vapor tube, offered it to the man in the sucker’s seat and set the declined cylinder on the dashboard next to the animated picture of his laughing, round-faced wife and two beaming daughters. An airborne riot wagon sped over the truck, its hull thrusters flashing brightly in the skyview octagon.
“You should stop calling her,” said Mikek without preamble.
“Thanks for the advice.”
“Nothing good ever comes from these calls.”
“You on her payroll?”
“You get really, really drunk or you brood, or you do both with profanity. And you play those depressing songs that make people leave the bar. Stop calling her.”
“I don’t call her that much,” defended Champ. “It’s been more than a month.”
“That’s only because you’re trying to prove to her that you’re independent. If Candace let you, you’d call her all the time.”
“We had a lot of good years, and she knows me better than anybody else. We saw the world together.”
“Think of your relationship like a hamburger. It was delicious while you ate it, but afterwards…. ” Mikek grimaced. “Smelly.”
“I might choose not think of it that way.”
“As a happily married man, I—whoa, whoa, whoa! Look at that dairy!” Mikek pointed to an octagon that displayed three young women who were emerging from the velvet portal of a dance club, their metallic slips and matching heels glimmering. “The one on the left. Do you see the one on left? That’s the living definition of dairy.”
Champ watched the chosen woman bump into her friend and giggle. “I suppose you’d hit her with the truck?”
“I’d do a one-eighty on those buttocks.”
The garbage truck continued up the avenue, and the image of the stumbling trinity diminished in the rearview octagon.
“As a happily married man,” Mikek resumed, “I feel that I have some insights I could share with you—about relationships and women.”
“Run them over with a garbage truck?” suggested Champ.
“That’s only for pretend. I’d never hurt anybody.”
“But your imaginary hospital is filled with gorgeous cripples.”
“You gonna practice your comedy that nobody laughs at, or are you gonna learn something from a guy who’s got all this?” The driver pointed to the animated picture of his wife and daughters.
“Begin the lecture,” said Champ, intending to tune the fellow out.
Mikek cleared his throat and announced, “A man is a tool that a woman uses.”
After five seconds of silence, Champ inquired, “That’s it?”
“That’s the headline,” replied Mikek, turning the vehicle north. “A woman wants to move her collection of antique cast-iron sewing machines? She gets a man. She wants the ingredient that turns her egg into a kid? She gets a man. She wants her body kissed all over? She gets a man. Somebody just broke into the house with a gun? Send her a man to see what’s the matter.”
“I can see why your wife’s smiling.”
“Let me finish, funny guy. The woman may love the man, she may be kind to the man, she may even be nicer to the man than she is to herself, but the man is a tool that helps her achieve her goals—the primal goals wired into her genes. She wants to have kids, she wants a good home and she wants to be safe.
“And because the woman is so beautiful, the man has no choice but to help her, to be her tool. He never did. That’s in his genes—that attraction so strong that he’ll accept the woman’s goals as his own. He’s a sucker. And it’s been that way ever since the man was a caveman. Keep the pretty woman safe, make sure she’s got enough woolly mammoth meat, roll the rock in front of the cave so the rain doesn’t get inside, hold her at night in case a saber-tooth tiger comes along. Serve her. Be her tool. Help that woman have some kids in a safe home.
“If it didn’t go that way,” Mikek added, “we’d be extinct like those Neandertals. Those men didn’t take care of those women—when they were pregnant or whenever—and look how it went for them.
“Not so good.”
“Lots of women are supportive of their husbands,” opined Champ.
“Of course—and it might seem like those men are in charge—but even still, those men aren’t happy unless their wives are happy. And their wives aren’t happy unless they’re fulfilling those genetic goals or are on their way to fulfilling them.
“There are exceptions, but generally that’s what’s going on with women and why they bother with us.
“But nowadays—like for the last century—things are starting to get different. Complicated. More intellectual, less primal. If the man gets sick of being the tool—he’s not attracted to the woman anymore or his work is more important—there’s a divorce. And if the woman thinks the man is not the right tool for her—he won’t help her fulfill these goals, or he’s already helped her and she’s annoyed with him—there’s a divorce.
“The woman doesn’t need the tool like she used to.
“She can go to the store and get another man—or just do without one. She can pay somebody to move her antique cast-iron sewing machines, she can buy an apartment in a safe building and she can get pregnant on her own.
“How come you think there’re so many more lesbians than there used to be? It’s because they just don’t need us anymore.”
“When’re men gonna be obsolete?” asked Champ.
“There’ll probably be a war around twenty-three hundred.”
Mikek steered the vehicle onto a side street. Buildings scrolled up, down, left and right on the bugview.
“I watched a documentary,” explained the driver.
Champ withheld a laugh.
Mikek dragged on a vapor t
ube and set it down. “The point I’m making to you is your wife has a new tool. You should stop calling her.”
“I just think we should be friends.”
“You’re not friends. You’re the wrench she threw away.”
“Is this—is any of this stuff you’re saying—supposed to cheer me up?”
“I’m a man of facts,” admitted Mikek.
The truck sped past a sheaf bodega that was surrounded by Bangladeshi men in viridescent suits who sucked upon udon spools and squirted tamarind vials.
“When was the last time you saw your dad?” inquired the driver.
“Last week. The day he got out of CCI.” Champ recalled the horde of firemen at the station who had cheered and taken the mannequin into the night. The son of the celebrated fellow had tagged along for a while, but soon, he felt out of place amongst the bonded brethren and departed, unsure whether or not his father would even notice. “He’s got a lot of people in his life,” added the man in the sucker’s seat. “He’s a popular guy.”
“Sounds like an excuse for not making an effort.”
“It’s the truth. And we weren’t close the first time around.”
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