The Nervous System

by Nathan Larson

  Her command of basic English and her understanding of history and function of government were so deeply compromised that nobody took her seriously. Nobody took her seriously as the schools commissioner for the State of North Dakota. Nobody took her seriously as the mayor of Bismarck. And when she ran for state representative, well …

  But Kathleen was nice with a slogan, had cash to burn, and her hair was never less than white-lady perfect. So it goes.

  First husband-and-wife team with a hardcore agenda, just body-checking motherfuckers on the floor of the Senate.

  The very picture of modern, media-friendly American political extremism. Modern, modern, modern, and biracial at that; the union of a golden Son of Harlem with blueblood corn-fed Midwestern stock proved a powerful one. Something for everybody, like.

  A loose photograph slips out of the file, depicting a girl I assume to be Song Ji-Won. It’s a still from a security camera, high-resolution this time, cropped so I’m only really able to see her and no context.

  Song is laughing, her hand blurred slightly in midgesture. Maybe eighteen to twenty-one years old, wearing a gray waist-length fur. Black or very dark red nail polish. She’s a stunner, vibes extreme confidence. Looks smart, and like she’s enjoying herself.

  I slide this photo into my inner breast pocket.

  NYPD file. Dated eighteen years back.

  Crime scene photos, an industrial barrel bearing the stencil PROMISE LAND IMPORTS, a mass of cabbage and what appears to be a scalp, or the top of a human head, as well as a protruding stump. More photos along these lines, which I choose to leave alone.

  The text is minimal, two bodies:

  —Unidentified 19–21 year old Asian female remains, dismembered, minus hands/feet/teeth, face burned off/soldered really, perhaps by blowtorch. Partial silicon breast implants (serial numbers removed/unreadable).

  —Unidentified child, approximately 2 years old, Asian mix, dismembered and incomplete in the same manner as other body.

  Within ten hours of the discovery of the dead came the arrest of one Kwon Man Seok, a.k.a. K-Man, a twenty-three-year-old midlevel Kkangpae lieutenant in the Korean mob, coowner of Promise Land Imports and the Executive Comfort Lounge, 18 West 33rd Street, a hostess bar, both businesses known funnels for human traffic, narcotics, and prostitution, according to the report.

  The female was presumed to be the “property” of a competitor, no identification necessary. Unknowable turf disputes were cited, and I find no further mention of the child.

  Case frickin closed + enjoy your weekend, boys.

  But hey now. What have we here? K-Man strolls out the joint in May 2006, according to his parole report. Free and clear and nary another mention herein.

  Damn, I know a hooker isn’t worth much to our justice system, but a child? To walk that early, it’s downright stanky.

  His rap sheet. Small-time syndicate stuff. Suspicion of human trafficking, drug possession, reports of illegal organ trade. All dismissed or deferred.

  Rosenblatt also included a page with a single CCTV photograph showing Senator Howard and a man identified as Korean mob boss Danny Ya, who would have been K-Man’s senior officer, in front of the Tribeca restaurant Nobu. The date is two weeks before the discovery of the bodies.

  A day prior, we have a printed transcript of Howard holding a conversation with two men at the Calvisius Caviar Lounge, Four Seasons Hotel, NYC—one Nic Deluccia, “formerly of the NYPD,” I get a za-zing cause I know that name; and an unidentified “active ATF agent”—during which the senator makes such regrettable statements as, “She is asking for too goddamn much now,” and, “[Garbled] easiest to make the whole motherfucking thing [fingersnap] disappear.”

  Hold up. Nic Deluccia? I get an image, a small room, scarred-up wooden table, white dudes, a can of Tab … cops.

  Nothing more for the moment. It may or may not come, so I move on.

  Deluccia is credited with this zinger: “Just have to know the right people in that community, fucking bucketheads [garbled], but these things can be very simply resolved.” To which the senator responds: “It’s a question of perception, how this thing is made to appear.”

  And most distasteful of all, at least to me, is this exchange:

  Sen. Howard: Kids?

  Deluccia: No sir.

  Male 2: My boy is thirteen …

  Sen. Howard: Tough age.

  [Laughter.]

  Male 2: Tell me about it … and my eighteen-year-old, ah, daughter, starting up at Barnard this fall. Big transition.

  Sen. Howard: That it is. Good school. Bit free-thinking, if you catch my meaning. I’d keep an eye on her.

  [Laughter.]

  Sen. Howard: But a fine school. Children, biggest blessing in life.

  [Interruption, passing waiter.]

  Sen. Howard: [Garbled] will forever haunt me, involving the … But I don’t see how …

  Deluccia: Can’t concern yourself with that, sir. [Garbled] as collateral, unavoidable and of course very unfortunate, a very difficult thing.

  Sen. Howard: God forgives. We have only to ask.

  Male 2: As you say, sir.

  No photographs accompany this section, but we have a dated CD in the plastic slip holding the transcript. I assume this to be audio of the conversation. If I want to listen to it, I’d have to find a goddamn CD player, which sounds so motherfucking exhausting that for the time being I’m happy to take the transcripts at face value.

  Peep the disc sideways, hold the penlight to it. Could be holding data too for that matter, it’s been awhile since I’ve seen one of these.

  Nic Deluccia? Think. This skull of mine. Sealed-off sections, vaults, like Al Capone’s: maybe containing a stale absence … maybe choked with radiant gems. All I can dredge is a televised news conference … Gotti-era mob sting?

  I go deeper. A blue-uniformed Nic Deluccia at a podium, brass buttons, a bouquet of microphones … and Jesus, if I have the perspective right, I’m up there too. Among the uniforms. Deluccia or somebody saying, “… what we can accomplish when working in cooperation with local communities.” Held aloft is a New York Post, headline reading, “Bronx Baby-Grabber Nabbed.” Scattered applause. I must be a kid, cause everything seems outsized, too big. Flash cameras going off. Nic is turning toward me, headless, and another flash wipes the scene.

  It’s in there somewhere. I know this man. I’d have to run a more intensive scan. Let that simmer. I’ve learned I can’t force it.

  Also learned I can’t trust it either. False memory a distinct possibility.

  Bite my penlight. Back to the papers, the big picture. Rosenblatt was a world-class bullshitter, and he must have known that some of this here is pretty thin, but gut level says it’s real. With highly dubious and circumstantial aspects, but real enough.

  I replace the file and rise, wincing at my fucking knee. Automatically shake the pill bottle in my pocket, pop it open, and drop one down my gullet.

  Well, Clarence Howard, I do believe I’ve seen enough to make an initial assessment.

  What nags is that all this material is so frickin old. Given what the public and private sectors have had to struggle through post–9/11 and particularly post–2/14, I find it hard to fathom why the whole narrative couldn’t just be dismissed. Who gives a shit, really? We got fresher fish to fry, all of us.

  But it’s a profoundly ugly story. And the senator seems very anxious to kill it, even at this late date. I sense movement between the lines.

  Listen here: I fear no man, save myself. Power has been redistributed with the upheaval brought about by 2/14. The playing field leveled. The agents of Babylon, they no longer hold the best cards. They may have more men, more bullets, but when it comes down to it, instinct and mojo trump cash money.

  It’s a knife fight out there, intimate, cheek-to-cheek. And I was raised on that tit.

  Flow proactive.

  Happy minding my own, but if the senator wants to raise a ruckus, I’m only too willing to oblige.
Smack me, and I smack you back. That’s real.

  This dude concerned about exposure with this nasty hooker cut-up? We’ll give him exposure. Realness: on the street, you hit first and you hit hard cause you never know what the other guy’s got.

  Fucking threaten me, man? Fucking threaten the New York Public Library? The books are eternal, nigger. The books, they’re bigger than all of us.

  Plus, I’m not into hurting the ladies. Don’t countenance chopping up kids.

  Next moves. Starting points. Scare up some Koreans, and see what shakes loose.

  On the back of the folder is a Post-It, a couple phone numbers, which do me no good, as landlines are a thing of the past. Hell, as are cellular networks if you’re not military, and even then …

  But we also have a couple loose addresses:

  Club Enduring Freedom, 8 West 32nd, suite 602

  Bubble Teen Tea + BBQ, 38 West 32nd, ninth floor

  I peel this off, and take the page detailing Promise Land and the Executive Comfort Lounge. Commit the moniker “K-Man” to memory, easy enough though my memory is spotty.

  Did I mention this?

  Shoulder everything relevant to the good senator. Down a couple aisles I deposit this pile amongst upward of seventy-five editions of Dante’s Inferno, of various vintages, languages, and bindings.

  From here, I move to the area I affectionately call “the 600,” which is Melvil’s class code for “Technology and Applied Science.” Have to count aisles but I’m almost at the point where I can find it on feel alone.

  Enclosed by wire shelving, the mess in this fortysquare-foot cubicle disturbs my sensibilities, but these pockets are bound to form when one is engaged in ambitious projects like mine.

  See, as I come across material that meets specific classification criteria, I’ve begun simply dumping it in the appropriate area like the 600 here. It makes for temporary unsightliness, but allows me to kill two birds without losing focus on the work I’m doing when I come across volumes that obviously belong somewhere else.

  In the midst of this chaos, two steamer trunks. One contains a generous amount of heavy-duty explosives. To be frank, I don’t know where this cache came from or what use I could ever possibly put it to.

  No, ignoring the accumulations of books and drifts of loose papers, as this mess is already making me sweat, I crack open the other box, a big blackened Louis Vuitton, and have a gander inside. Dig: two extra bottles of pills, twelve-pack of PurellTM, army blanket, yet more jerky.

  Without knowing exactly why, I grab an old CD. Call it nostalgia. Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) … used to listen to this record before going out on an assignment, made a boy feel bulletproof.

  More of a talisman than anything else. Like I’m gonna run into a CD player, dead tech as it is. I assume they once had them here but I arrived after the major looting had played itself out.

  And now the items I’m actually looking for: an ankle holster containing an ultracompact Sig Sauer P290, this pulled off yet another deceased Serb; what the hell, I strap it on, and whilst doing so I peep some items that give me a new idea with respect to the current weather …

  A pair of miniaturized Maindeka limpet mines.

  These I snaked off a digger up at the Bryant Park site on the surface above my head, and I take them now, anticipating the same construction firm I borrowed these from will have (again) sealed the exit for which I’m bound.

  They seal it; I blow it up using their own shit. Rinse and repeat.

  What I don’t appreciate is that this exit is not part of the original library’s fabric—so I have absolutely no qualms about destroying a nonoriginal door.

  My horde disorder and enhanced paranoia paying off large, people. I’m geared up.

  Feeling a touch on the smug side, I pop a pill. Make for the tunnel, due northwest. Beyond the seemingly infinite shelving.

  Thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers, the passage I’m headed into now is going to provide me with a way out that the Cyna-corp fucks will not be privy to. Hopefully.

  Just after 2/14, public buildings were prepped for use as mass shelters. Alternate in-and-out routes were essential. Hence the newish underground traverse beneath the length of Bryant Park, likely forgotten by the few who were aware of it in the first place.

  This will deposit me at West 41st Street and Sixth Avenue. At which point my plan is take a mellow stroll downtown.

  And hope against hope I don’t get myself dead en route.

  _______________

  Dirt walls packed tight, reinforced by heavy plastic and wood, the penlight trained on the ground so I might avoid organic things and areas of wet. Focus focus focus, cause I don’t like tight spaces, plus too jacked to get neurotic—hey now, I’ve got my wing tips moving and I’m feeling myself in a big way. Color me jaunty. I’m mentally whistling a little tuneless something, and I come around a final soft curve prior to the exit.

  Yonder, I clock the slotted metal gate that will allow me access to the Avenue of the Americas, watery daylight weak as ’80s bodega coffee, illuminating no more than the last six feet of the hole I’m in.

  And not for the first time in my raggedy life, I marvel at my breathtakingly stupid ability to overvalue my own acumen. For, unsurprisingly, a pair of bodies are parked at the head of the egress, just outside the gateway, sporting the future-ninja signature dress of Cyna-corp soldiers.

  Always in twos. I sigh and click the penlight off.

  The Maker would perhaps at this juncture have me hearken back to the last such situation, the similarities too glaring to sidestep, a desperate Dewey Decimal on the run with a gun, careening into a duo of soldiers standing point, blocking passage, at least from Dewey’s altered perspective, between the darkness and the light.

  Perhaps we have here a cosmic test of sorts. To see if a less messy solution is achievable. Or indeed desirable.

  But fuck the theology. I bring my good knee down on the clay to stay out of sight and give myself a moment, part of my brain veering immediately into concern for my pants—yeah, but this is vanity and vanity is weakness. Scope the two bruisers for possible nonfatal target points.

  Hmm.

  What makes these cats so freaking intimidating is primarily their vastly superior kit. Featherweight, powered exoskeletons (brought to you by General Electric), sexy custom A-15 machine pistols, drool-inducing smart headgear, 360-degree selectable view, built-in GPS, etc. And most relevant: voice-activated com systems, making it virtually impossible to disable the wearer quietly without a high-impact headshot. And even then the helmet sends an alarm to a central location.

  So what’s a simple fella of modest means like me to do? I wash down a pill with some bottled water. Look at the hands: steady as she goes.

  In sharp contrast to the cyborgy cock-extensions in which these prim donnas swish around is the soggy cardboard crapola Uncle Sam issues its own in the field. Hell. I conjure up another (mind you: possibly implanted) memory of trying to keep sand out of my mouth, as my entire patrol and I struggle to bang corrugated scrap metal into a shape that might conceivably protect us from antitank fire.

  Slapstick stuff. Physical comedy.

  I pause at the notion of kicking this motherfucker off. There will be nasty and hasty blowback. To the extent that a man can, I know my own murky heart. I am foresworn to protect this building and its contents. But the ignoble truth breaks down like this: I’d rather risk watching everything implode than be confronted with my own name.

  Dig me, I think I got this, with some help from the System. Think I can get over. And what’s more, somebody’s gotta get these fuckers away from my library, even if it means burning a few books.

  Now here I squat, a mini–limpet mine burning a hole in each jacket pocket about the size of a late-twentieth-century nine-volt battery. I finger them, leave my gun in place.

  Remember this well, people: unless you employ maximum violence with these psychos from the jump, they will kill your ass faster than you can spit.


  So let’s opt for the head-on approach. Rising with a grunt, I send up a prayer to Shiva that we can do this with a minimum of mayhem.

  They’re talking quietly, two beetles on their hind legs, perhaps chatting with each other (or perhaps not, given the headwear), one of them with his/her back to me, leaning against the sealed gate, the other idly rubbing a polymer forearm.

  Slacking. I shake my head at this, for shame. Snap to it, earn that pricey gear.

  Call to them now: “Hey, yo! Letting you know, I’m unarmed!” My voice thick. Thirsty.

  Lowering my surgical mask, I limp their way, overdoing my legit handicap, gloved hands in the air.

  The soldiers jerk around, one steps awkwardly and stumbles slightly, laser sights swing my way, the other saying, “Hands! Let’s see ’em!”

  Jiggle my hands like, duh, Al Jolson, jazz hands. “Already got ’em up, my brother, got nothing on me.”

  I’m about ten feet away, other guy calls out: “Stop where you are, pal.”

  I keep coming like I haven’t heard.

  “Just an appeal … Look, I’m stuck down in here, I understand that …”

  Dudes have their fancy A-15 machine pistols trained on me. Red lights up in my grill, feel them on my forehead.

  “Subject at my location, flight attempt, please advise, over,” mumbles one into the headgear.

  Holding up my right hand, slow down, I’m saying, “Hey, I’m in here with absolutely no fucking food supply whatsoever, okay, you people got me on lockdown, I dig that …” My left hand goes to my jacket pocket and I withdraw a limpet. “Just requesting some rations, whatever you all feel like you have on you …”

  Reach the gate, “Back the fuck up!” calls one of them.

  I get ahold of a thick metal slat on the gate, put my palms to it, press the limpet on there good, press hard now to engage the explosive, twenty seconds, count ’em down, saying, “Honestly, y’all, this isn’t a hostile—”

  “Back the fuck up!” repeats the beetle. So I do it.

  “All right. Easy now. Just hoping to appeal to your …”

  Backing up, fifteen seconds, guy muttering, “Subject moving northbound through tunnel A, permission to pursue and detain …”