I’m listening close, smelling him close; don’t think he’s lying.
Not dealers, but definitely punks.
Things’re worse than I thought.
“Can we get you something to drink?” the woman asks – Tracy’s mom. Tracy looks younger than she is; mom looks older than she is. Premature grey; heavy lines around the eyes. Corners of the mouth defaulting down; nervous little ticks in her lips, eyelids. I shake my head no to her offer of a drink.
She’s holding it together pretty well, but I pop another pill just in case. Living room on the courtyard’s kind of nice – big sliding balcony doors leading out onto a small deck. Community vegetable garden taking up most of the lawn space. I sit on the couch, figuring it’s the only thing in the room that can take the weight of my reinforced skeleton.
Scuffed hardwood floor’s kind of warped, but well kept; a monitor in the corner, some chairs and food put out for the half-dozen condo board guys. Place is rundown – they put these things up in the 1980s – but Tracy’s mom is doing the best she can with it. Beth, I think the woman’s name is.
“They weren’t dealers, far as I could tell,” I report. “Anyway, they weren’t set up yet if they were.”
“Well, we appreciate what you did regardless,” a small, slope-shouldered, balding gent with wire-rimmed eyeglasses says to me. I gather he’s the president of the condo board, and I gather he wasn’t consulted about my little intervention. He holds his gaze pretty level, staring at my snout instead of my “eyes.” Can’t blame him. Something erratic about his pulse, but hey – he’s probably never been face to face with a Gunboat before.
“Definitely,” someone else says – heavy-set black woman with a kerchief around her head. “Thank you.”
Murmured agreement from the rest of the assembled. Older folks mostly, all hollow cheeks and worried eyes.
“There’s lots of abandoned units,” Beth says, smiling. “You don’t have to live down at the river. Really, I mean…if you want to, you could take one.”
“That’s probably not a great idea,” I say. “Thanks though.”
“We’re taking up a collection,” the president says, sitting upright with hands on his knees. He’s an adaptable guy. Having been left out of the decision-making at the start, he’s taking over the process now. “We’ll get you paid by the end of the day.”
“Appreciate it,” I say, “but you might want to think things over a bit.”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“Well, the Mexican kid told me they were paid a decent amount of money to take up residence where they did. Hassling you at the garbage bins; partying late…that was their job.”
“Their job?” Tracy’s mom, suddenly spooked. I can practically feel her thinking about her kid. Concern like that has a smell. “What are you saying?”
“Does the name Zitadelle Management mean anything to you?”
“Well yeah, that’s our property manager,” the president says, frowning. Heart pounding. He should have that checked.
“Makes sense,” I say.
“How?” Tracy’s mom.
“Rundown condo development from the 1980s five minutes away from downtown? Riverside property? Walking distance to the last legacy park in the city? Breakup and land value is worth more than you guys. Look at the neighbourhoods around you – all those mansions? Surprised you’ve lasted this long.”
I look at their silent faces, their thoughtful eyes as they work through the math. Pisses me off, seeing them put it all together. That moment when you realize you’re just another disposable commodity. You’ve been out-competed; you’re out of gas, out of moves. No cops left outside of the homicide division, no municipal government to speak of, just folks with money and folks without. These ones hanging on by their fucking fingernails. Doing whatever they can to stay in the country of their birth, even though all the work for people like these is mostly overseas.
Pisses me off I fought for this. I was created to enforce this.
Have to get a hold of myself. Getting angry won’t end well.
“Maybe I will take a unit,” I say, playing a hunch. “For a while. It has to be one that doesn’t have neighbours.”
“I can show you,” Tracy pipes up. Beth glances a glance that says no, but the kid obviously isn’t in the habit of heeding her elders. Tracy’s smiling, happy to help.
I smell the anxiety in the room, but also some relief. Nobody’s super-comfortable with me, but some of them like the idea of muscle in the ‘hood. Their muscle. Some way to answer; some way to push back.
Not everybody though. Most of my deep-diagnostics are shot, but I’ve still got hyper-sensory input and good old-fashioned instincts. I can parse the different kinds of fear the way normal folks distinguish different flavours.
I know somebody’s not happy at all with my decision.
I look up through the hole in the roof of my second-floor bedroom. Nighttime now; clear night, dim stars.
I lie back on a crusty foam mattress, hands behind my head. The mattress, along with other telltale signs, indicates to me that I’m not the first vagrant to occupy the joint. I don’t need shelter now of course – I’m rated for minus 90 degrees centigrade, can metabolize whatever’s available for food – but there is something about having a roof, even a partial roof, over your head. Feels nostalgic. Reminds me I wasn’t always a Gunboat.
Somewhere up there in low Earth orbit is the “Deck” – the space station command for JSOC Inc. Once, I would’ve been connected directly – like a direct line to Mount Olympus, with access to all the world’s data, and the processing muscle to handle it. Once, I could have called down hell itself from space, and had done, in mountains and jungles a world away from here.
Lying here in the dark, I can smell the smell of burning village again. Burning flesh. It’s funny how the smell stays with you, that it’s the smell you can conjure up with relentless fidelity.
“You better get in here before you break your neck,” I say into the night. Tracy’s head comes into view at the side of the hole. She does a little balance check, then lowers herself into the room like a cat burglar.
“Hey,” Tracy says.
“What’re you, my sidekick?”
“You wish.”
“You can’t hang around me, kid. God forbid you ever do actually surprise me.”
“I think that it’s good you’re here.”
“‘Good is ideologically constructed.’”
“Huh?”
“Lemme ask you something. You ever drown cats or kill birds for fun – anything like that?”
“No.”
I consider the answer. Her heart doesn’t skip a beat, even with a question like that out of the blue. I have no idea if she’s lying. Finally, I say: “You bring a phone?”
Tracy pulls a wafer phone out of her back pocket, unfolding it, then activating it. A bright electric blue lights up the oval of her face. She walks over, hands the phone to me, sits down cross-legged just off the mattress.
I sit up. Suddenly, I think maybe I don’t want to do this. I make a call, I start figuring things out…pretty soon things get complicated.
I’m winding down. I’ve been decommissioned. I’m obsolete. I should just go back to the river and let things take their course. That was the plan, after all.
Most of the shit I’ve done, it wasn’t my fault. There’s no such thing as a non-combatant these days. I don’t sit around blaming myself and feeling guilty for the way the world works.
Fuck it: I make the call.
Toll-free to a ground station; voice ident; relay to a substation, then signal-stitched to satellite. Mac answers from the Deck on the third ring.
“Who’s ‘Tracy’?” he says.
“It’s me, Mac,” I say. He’ll know. Fifty years as my dedicated handler on Deck, he’d know my voice anywhere. Parts of me are pushing one hundred; God knows how old Mac is. We both know who Ferris Bueller is. What a VCR was. What “universal healthcare” meant.<
br />
“Jonas,” he says, too nerveless to sound surprised, but I know he is, deep down. “Been a while.”
“Weird talking to you on a phone, that’s for sure.” Once upon a time, Mac’s voice just would have sounded in my head, like the voice of God.
“Weird’s one way of saying it. Not-protocol would be another.”
“I need a favour. A Deck favour. Can’t do it myself, remember?”
“You’re offline, Jonas. Retired. Supposedly staying out of trouble.”
“I need you to light me up for about fifteen minutes Mac. Need to run some connections. Just Big Data diagnostics, nothing else.”
“Just diagnostics,” he says. “Who you planning to kill?”
“I’d say ‘planning’ is an overstatement in this case. Doubt it will come to that.”
“How’s it going down there, Jonas? Really. You all right?”
“You gonna help, or…”
There’s a long pause. It’s not illegal, what I’m asking Mac to do, but it’ll be monitored, and recorded. Whatever I’m up to could come back on him, if it breaks wrong. Against that, I can sense Mac weighing our history together. Everything I did, he was there, in my head, helping. I’ve never seen his face, but I’ve never been closer to another human being. Not even my wife, God bless her soul.
Eventually Mac says: “Fifteen minutes.”
Seconds later my heads-up display reactivates and I can hear Tracy perk up at the sight. In the dark, my bug-black eye-coverings must be giving off some eerie glow. A new thrill for her – something to go with the teeth.
I get to work, knowing Mac won’t give me one second more than the fifteen minutes discussed.
It doesn’t take five to prove what I kinda, sorta already knew.
“Holy…shit…” the condo president sputters, sitting up in bed. I’ve opened the drapes of his bedroom window to the moonlight so he can be dimly aware of my bulk in the gloom. I smell the stink of fear wafting off his skin and smile at the juice it gives me. Way they figured it – the geniuses who built me – by tuning my own aggression matrix to react to the fear I invariably cause, a kind of killing-feedback loop develops. The more vicious I get, the more terrorists freak out, and so on. Once I commit, there’s no turning back, no hesitation. My own nervous system won’t let me back off.
Just the sound of this guy’s heart slapping around in his chest makes me visualize tearing his throat out with my teeth. Really gets me going, actually. But I don’t flip the switch just yet.
“You need to calm down, Don,” I say, voice rumbling in the small confines of the room. Naturally, his pulse spikes. “Don Wilcox, thirty-eight. Divorced. Freelance data processor and IT huckster; Amway salesman; financial planner; all-around bottom-feeding piece of shit. Elected to the condo board of Bow Groves six months ago. Zitadelle Management has no Calgary office, but you trace it up the chain and you can see they’re part of a REIT out of Houston. They’ve done the math, and it’s time to plough this complex under. Bought you off; gave you the money to hire those thugs, and that’s really just your first move, am I right? Smart, hiring them online without any face-time. Not bad.”
“How…how did you get in here…”
“I know, right? Seven feet, four hundred pounds give or take, you’d think you’d hear me coming, but you know what? Stealth’s a big part of the package. They thought of everything, believe me. Anyway. Up and at ’em, Don.”
“What…what’re you…”
“It’s just after midnight. You’ve got till sunrise to get packed and get gone.”
“Gone?”
“You’re moving out. And you’re never coming back. Now here’s the thing, Don: some part of you is thinking about calling the property manager. You’re thinking they can send some muscle up here, you can lever me out of the picture and just strong-arm the remaining families like you probably should’ve done in the first place. But you know me, you know what I am. The second you make that call, I’ll see it. You can’t hide from Gunboats, Don: that’s the whole, entire point of us. We see what you’re doing, then we come to get you. That’s why I can afford to let you leave with your life, Don. Because you’re as good as dead the moment I want you to be.”
I stare at him in the moonlight, knowing all he can see is the deep black where my eyes should be. It’s all a bluff, of course. A fully functional, wired-up Gunboat could do those things, but a first-gen rust-bucket who’s been taken off the grid? Not a chance.
I can smell the fear on Don though, and I know the flavour. He doesn’t have the balls for a double-cross. Doesn’t have the brains to see that all this is way too small-time for a sanctioned Gunboat intervention. He’s pissing himself with gratitude that he’ll be allowed to skulk away like a thief in the night.
Good enough.
It’s a nice fall night – cool, but not yet frosting up. I walk back to my unit, boots echoing loud on the empty streets between townhouses. This is a huge complex – damn near a kilometre long, two blocks deep of grey, two-storey row-units of varying sizes. In the dark, it’s still kind of pretty in here, with old-growth trees along the main roads leading back to the Trans-Canada and large green areas separating various sections of the development. These condos are threadbare buildings though – lots of water-damaged walls, collapsed roofs, wonky garage doors. It’s only a matter of time this place goes under, resident Gunboat or no.
I know there are pockets like this all over the city. Analogue neighbourhoods, not wired up, not smart, filled with analog people who try with their smartphones and videogames to pass as digital, but nobody’s fooled. Communities like surrounded armies in hedgehog formation, cut off from all hope, gradually dwindling under the relentless pressure of market forces. Yay, “freedom” – glad I fought for that. Sure sounded good when I volunteered for the Gunboat program.
I turn onto my street, noting the absence of street lighting in this part of the complex. Just as well. I figure I’ll stay indoors during the day, stretch my legs at night. Anybody needs me, they can send Tracy to come fetch. Spooky kid.
My driveway, then a little cobblestone walk to my front stairs – all shrouded in shadow.
There’s an open box filled with root vegetables and processed meat in plastic wrap. There’s a bag of coins and notes backed by various companies, and good throughout Alberta. There’s a card – a handwritten thank-you card – and that makes me chuckle. Just like these people, write a card for a guy.
I put the coins and card into the box and scoop the whole thing up.
Can’t say it’s home, but I will say this: it reminds me of home. Reminds me of a time when people owned stuff, expected to stick to places. Reminds me of me when I wanted those things. There’s a doomed little idea of home here in the darkness.
I’ll take it.
SAFETY
Michael Mirolla
She’s in the apartment alone, waiting for her husband of two days to return from work, when the doorbell rings. It couldn’t be him. Too early yet. So she opens the door cautiously and keeps the chain in place. The pleasant face with a thick moustache smiles and explains that he’s there to repair the phone. Trouble has been traced to her landline. And he’s come to fix it. That is, if she’ll let him in, he says chuckling pleasantly. “One moment,” she says and, making as if to release the chain, slams the door in his face.
“You can’t fool me!” she yells, trembling with a combination of fright and anger. “No sir. You can’t fool me. There’s nothing the matter with our landline for the simple reason we don’t have one. So you’d better leave right now because my husband’s on his way home. And I’m going to dial 911 on my cell phone.”
“Sorry to have bothered you, Miss,” a muffled yet still pleasant voice says apologetically. “I guess it’s the apartment next to yours that’s having problems. These machines aren’t too particular sometimes. Sorry again. Hope I haven’t inconvenienced you.”
“Not at all,” she whispers, listening intently as his steps fade down
the hall. And grateful that the bluff about a cellphone worked. She’s ordered one but hasn’t yet managed to pick it up. Perhaps she’d been too hard on the man. Perhaps it had been a genuine error on his part. She’s always been of the opinion that telephone repairmen aren’t too bright as a group.
For the next twenty minutes, she sits in what she figures is the exact centre of the living-room floor (their furniture on order but having not yet arrived) and contemplates the walls. She folds her legs beneath her and visualizes the finished apartment – the multicoloured matching drapes and curtains, a beautiful warm sofa, antique dressers, a King Arthur oaken table and chairs, a four-poster bed with or without canopy. She has almost decided a name for the baby when a tapping across the bedroom window shocks her out of the reverie. She lets out a yelp and bites her hand. There, framed by the first few flakes of snow and dangling upside down, is the unshaven face of a man, smiling at her through yellow gap-spaced teeth. He has a steaming rag in his hand. She backs out of his line of sight, her heart threatening to leap out of her chest and go thumping across the floor. The tapping resumes. My God, she asks herself, are the windows closed? Is he going to smash the glass and leap through, a shard in his hand? Already she can smell his breath, feel his raw calloused fingers gripping her throat. But there is no smashing of windowpanes, no sudden descent into the bedroom. Only the tapping. She walks cautiously to the kitchen and peers out. Oh Jesus, what a fool! What a complete idiot she’s made of herself. The man dangling upside down is busy scrubbing the dirt-encrusted windows, the very windows she’d complained to the landlord about. “Yes, ma’am,” he’d said. “We’ll clean them till they sparkle.” In order to do so, the man had to reach in between thick iron bars spaced four inches apart. In fact, it was she who’d insisted on such a precaution. She goes back into the bedroom and unpins the temporary curtains – bedsheets, actually – much to the pantomimed dismay of the man on the scaffolding who, at one point just before his face disappears, has one hand over his heart and the other wiping away imaginary tears. She laughs, then peeks through the curtains for one last time. He is now threatening to jump off, taking little leaps from one end and landing at the other.
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