The Poison Sky

by John Shannon

  “Accidents don’t have meanings,” he said.

  “I know. All that stuff you saw in this room, I was just trying to work out some choreography I remembered.” She shrugged and rubbed her head against him. She caught up his forearm and held it for a moment, then pulled his arm around her shoulders, like teens at the drive-in. “Things haven’t been working between Milo and me for over a year, Jack,” she said, and then she was asleep and snoring softly.

  He was relieved because her story made him like her a lot more than he had at first, but he couldn’t have let things slide any further. He lowered her so her head settled against his leg and then leaned back himself. He was so weary he couldn’t hold his eyes open. Some bodyguard he’d make, he thought, when the redhead came in through the window.

  He woke with a start, a cramp seizing his leg. He was alone on the sofa, and light streamed in through gauze curtains. Soft classical music was playing, and like an apparition, Faye suddenly danced across his vision wearing tights and a black turtleneck. She was very graceful. She kicked, spun, and performed some fluid gesture with her arms, then disappeared again.

  “It’s a wonder you didn’t take advantage of such a vulnerable creature last night.”

  “Who says I didn’t?” he said, now that it was safe.

  She laughed, somewhere out of sight, and came right back with a mug of black coffee for him. It smelled heavenly.

  “I think I kind of made a fool of myself.”

  “Not with me, you didn’t.”

  “Oh, yes, I did.” She sipped from her own coffee mug, tucking one leg in and extending it repeatedly, as if testing her memory of the movement. “You never forget how to do it,” she said, and smiled. “If you’re going to be abstemious, you ought to deny yourself caffeine, too.”

  “Everything has its limits, even moderation.”

  “I used to think people either chose the passionate life or they chickened out and gave up to get calm and security. But they’re both choices. Whichever way you choose, you lose the other.”

  “It’s probably possible to lose both,” he said. He had to get home and shower and change before he picked up Maeve. “I’d like a quick look in Milo’s study.”

  “Help yourself.”

  A kind of tension developed inside him as the day took on reality. Beside Milo’s desk there was a three-foot-high stack of books resting on the floor, each with a number of paper bookmarks. Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze, plus a lot of names he didn’t recognize. There were small slips of notepaper scattered across the desk. He picked up a few at random:

  Spectacle is a degree of accumulation beyond the physical. It is money only looked at.

  Commotion is the result of the cultural exhaustion of a people.

  There are already too many ideas—and rhetorical excess is used to squeeze out one essence, any essence.

  Yes, indeed, Milo did seem to be thrashing around in critical theory. There was a yellow Post-it stuck to the computer screen, the message a bit different from the other notes: Against so many lives, I don’t matter a damn.

  He fumbled around until he got the computer and the modem turned on. He knew enough about personal computers to sign the machine onto the Internet, but as he’d expected, he couldn’t get into Milo’s E-mail without a password. He left it running.

  There were a few computer books on a shelf behind the computer, a lot of printouts of philosophical monographs that looked as impenetrable as the notes, a photograph of Yosemite with Faye and a young boy standing in front of Bridal Veil Falls, and a couple of handmade ceramic pots.

  He hunted Faye down. She was still tucking and untucking her left leg and staring dreamily out the kitchen window.

  “I’ll call you later.”

  “Thanks for looking after me, Jack.” She seemed about to make another confession.

  “I’ve got to run. I turned on Milo’s computer. Don’t turn it off until tonight.”

  That intrigued her and broke her concentration so she stumbled.

  7

  FULL COMBAT GRAMMAR

  IT WASN’T THE USUAL BOYFRIEND HE SAW PEERING OUT THE window to make sure Maeve got into a nice safe car. The man had a scrubby little caterpillar mustache and beady eyes, like Neville Chamberlain stepping off the plane from Munich. So Kathy had dumped the English teacher, he thought. He was happy to see that her love life wasn’t working out much better than his.

  Maeve came gaily down through the bougainvillea swinging the little checkered suitcase that looked like something an Eastern European refugee would carry. Her limbs were still as gangly as when he’d seen her last two months back—it had taken Kathy that long to relent on the visits—but Maeve looked like she was starting to get breasts, and he figured that was something he’d better not tease about.

  “Daddy!” She pecked his cheek and he took the suitcase from her. It was as if they’d only been apart a day.

  “Hi, sweetie. Wouldn’t you like something a little more stylish than this?” He put it into the trunk carefully, trying to keep it away from various grease-stained car parts.

  She shrugged graciously. “I know you don’t have a lot of money.”

  He laughed. “That’s like calling the bubonic plague a little chest rash, but we might be able to work something out. I’ve got a couple of clients.”

  “A couple?”

  “Okay, one,” he admitted. “But she’s paying. Who’s he?”

  She knew who he meant but she didn’t really want to talk about it.

  “So the English teacher went and got his verbs all parsed? What’s this one do? Install carpets? Hit man?”

  “Dan sells real estate.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Don’t be bigoted.”

  “Bigoted. We’re getting a vocabulary.”

  “Pooh. Dan’s a nice guy.”

  Jack Liffey put on an odd strangled voice. “I can’t be selling da house today. Da voices tell me it is time to clean all da guns.”

  She started giggling and climbed in. “I know he looks strange, but he’s not weird, really. You’re weird, you know, and I’ve got something else weird for you. I’ve got to know one thing first.” They saved up the oddities for one another like jewels—and it was a regular battle to one-up the opponent with the strangest. “You still touchy about earthquakes?”

  He wrinkled up his forehead. An aftershock of the last big quake had caught him in a collapsing house trying to rescue a client and given him a skull fracture. He’d been in a coma for a while and it had been touch and go, and the hair was still growing back where they’d put a metal plate in. He’d never go into an airport again without setting off all the alarms.

  “Touchy’s not in my vocabulary, honey.”

  “Good. Turn left up on Artesia. You’ll never beat this one.”

  There was a last disturbance of the front curtain as he drove off; he guessed it was Kathy this time. Okay, sure, he was still driving that 1979 AMC Concord with one primer fender.

  “You look tired, Daddy.”

  “I was up early beating up bad guys to defend my client’s honor.”

  She clung to his arm and rested her head against him. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.” And he felt such a wave of love for her that he had to slow down for a bit.

  THE road ended in a forest of parking meters fronting the beach. The last shops near the beachfront were pretty much what you’d expect—a seafood café, a bar, a liquor store, and a swimsuit bazaar with all the bright little hankies of cloth hanging limp from racks.

  “It’s over there on the side of Jeannie’s.”

  He parked and followed her to the tiny shingled café where a sign hawked cappuccino, burgers, and menudo. She skipped ahead a bit in the sun and it took her age back a notch or two. It was going to be a scorcher, he thought. He’d only been out of the car a minute and his hair already felt like hot wires burning his scalp.

  She went along a little concrete alleyway and made a grand flourish to end u
p pointing with both hands at something on the wall of the café. When he caught up he saw it was a plaque, cast in some sort of bronze-colored metal that wasn’t doing so bad at resisting the salt air. He had to stoop a bit to read it.

  NEAR THIS SPOT ON MAY 7, 1972, AN EIGHT-FOOT ACUPUNCTURE NEEDLE WAS INSERTED INTO THE EARTH TO CONTACT THE SOUTHERN ENERGY CONVERGENCE OF THE REGION’S LATERAL TORSION MERIDIAN AND PREVENT ANY FURTHER EARTHQUAKES. ACUPUNCTURE NEEDLES WERE INSERTED SIMULTANEOUSLY AT GRIFFITH OBSERVATORY AND THE BED OF THE LOS ANGELES RIVER AT HOLLYDALE PARK NEAR LYNWOOD. HERMOSA TEAM: THOM BREEDSDALE, MARIANNE STONE, JACK LIVEY, PICO RAMOS. ACUQUAKE ’72 PROJECT. POSSUNT QUIA POSSE VIDENTUR.

  Neither of them spoke for a moment, then Maeve pointed at the name Jack Livey. “Is that just misspelled?”

  “Yeah, it was me. Sure. I always keep an eight-foot acupuncture needle handy. Too bad it didn’t work.”

  She seemed a little hurt by his lack of reaction. “What’s the Latin?”

  “They can … that… can. Ah, those who think they can, can. Something like that.” He tried to imagine four hippies standing there with a big steel needle, surrounded by a crowd of cheering drugheads in bell-bottoms and 1972 granny glasses. It wasn’t that hard, but he glanced at the plaque again and its permanence gave him second thoughts about the scene. It had been an art happening. His mental picture of the geoacupuncturists aged and hardened. They had beards, wore black, offered cocky declarations, and wrote up their reflections in a journal later. He saw them passing around champagne like a gallery opening.

  “It’s pretty good.”

  But that wasn’t adequate. She frowned. “I knew you’d be freaked out by earthquakes.”

  “No, honey. It’s weird, all right. It’s just it all seems … so studied. There’s too many layers of irony here. My idea of oddities is a bit more innocently goofy. But I’ll give you a full point, two points.” He offered his crooked elbow to take her back to the car. “Are you touchy about geeks?”

  “Computer geeks?”

  “That’s the ticket.”

  “I’m not bigoted.”

  He smiled. “Good. We have to drop by a little company called PropellorHeads that’s chockablock with them.”

  “PropellorHeads! They made Night Dogs!” It was if he’d said he knew one of the Twelve Apostles, and not one of the obscure ones.

  “I thought you weren’t into computer games,” he said.

  They settled into the car and she tapped insistently on the clasp of his seat belt the instant she sat down. He put it on.

  “Remember one time you told me you’d never read Gone With the Wind but you knew what Rhett said to Scarlett because it was in the culture?”

  “What a memory. Sure. So Night Dogs is in the culture even if you don’t play it.”

  “It was the biggest thing after the Mario Brothers.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Daddy!”

  “Doesn’t anybody go bowling anymore?”

  THE elevator chugged upward. Somebody had hung padded blankets on the elevator walls, which meant movers, and he wondered if the furniture was coming or going. “What do you have against Gone With the Wind anyway?” she asked.

  “I don’t like the values it espouses. To be brutally frank, the Southern gentry can kiss my ass. Pardon my French.”

  She giggled. “You’re being hard on the book.”

  “If you ever decide to read it, make me a promise. Read a Faulkner afterward. He’s hard to read, but he doesn’t glorify bunk.”

  “I better not admit I read Little Women.”

  “No, that’s a fine book.” He noticed he was getting opinionated again. He’d convinced himself long ago not to carry around all that baggage, and as long as he’d been feeling miserable about things, he’d found the empty shelves a surprising comfort, but now that he had a paying client and was sleeping with Marlena again and things were looking up a bit, he found a sense of zest was inviting opinions willy-nilly back onto their shelf. “Realtors are all right,” he said, feeling magnanimous. “They perform a service to humanity.”

  “Don’t strain yourself, Daddy.”

  He laughed as the doors came open on the fifth floor. Something was subtly changed. Then he noticed the name PropellorHeads was gone from the double doors at the end. The doors came open and two really big guys in company T-shirts that read six STARVING GORILLAS carried out a black marble conference table.

  “Uh-oh.”

  He and Maeve stood aside for them.

  “PropellorHeads moved?” he asked.

  The guy in back jerked his head toward another door. “Reduced circumstances.”

  The door was unlocked and inside there was a very small secretary’s desk with no secretary. PropellorHeads had once had a whole opulent lobby with live video displays of their products. He led Maeve into a hallway where a banner said YOUR FATHER SMELT OF ELDERBERRIES. The banner had been torn in half and taped back together. A deflated shark hung overhead, like a joke that had gone sour, and extension cords ran along the wall.

  “Hello! Anyone here?”

  A young woman with acne and lank black hair stuck her head out a door. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Admiral Wicks or Michael Chen.”

  She popped a finger straight at him, as if he’d just picked the right answer in a TV quiz. “Good choices. They’re the only two Joe Codes who survived. Film at eleven.” She pointed at another door and pulled back into her office.

  A Dilbert cartoon was taped by the open door and the room was obviously only half set up. A skinny young black in a wheelchair was trying to sort out a huge wad of cabling and a young Asian was on his hands and knees under a desk. A homemade parrot cage with a big green parrot hung in a corner.

  “Gentlemen.”

  “Mr. Liffey!” Michael Chen jumped up, banging his head on the desk, and Admiral Wicks whirled around in his wheelchair. He’d worked with them once before, helping them beat off a predatory private eye who’d been working for a predatory Japanese conglomerate. His role in the division of labor had been the private eye and their hacking skills had done serious harm to the home company.

  “Mr. Liffey is my dad,” he insisted. “Call me Jack. I want you to meet my daughter, Maeve. Michael Chen. Admiral Wicks. Two of the best hackers in L.A.”

  “In the known universe,” Admiral Wicks corrected.

  They shook hands gravely. “Hi, there.”

  “What’s happened to PropellorHeads?” Jack Liffey asked.

  “We’re victims of the big shakeout in CD-ROM. Nobody much is making any money at it,” Admiral Wicks said. He was obsessively disentangling one strand of wire from the mass of cabling across his lap.

  “I thought you guys were doing okay.”

  “The boss hit a buzz saw.”

  “Serve the people,” the parrot squawked. It paced gravely inside its chicken-wire enclosure like a short-legged man in a frock coat, but they ignored it.

  “Moby layoff,” Michael Chen said. He lifted a cardboard carton onto one of the two desks in the room and peered inside. “Bruce’s hiding in his office, boozing and trying to forget that his company just had a futurectomy.”

  “That’s really sad,” Maeve said. “Did you guys work on Night Dogs?”

  Admiral Wicks grinned, and seemed to take her seriously for the first time. “That was elder days. We wrote the first version in assembly language.” He reached into a pile of trash on the desk. “You know this?”

  He held up a cardboard cutout of what looked like a brown bear with a lollipop for a head.

  “Huh-uh,” Maeve said.

  “You never really played Dogs, did you?” He shrugged and set it aside. “Nobody’s playing enough of anything these days.”

  “Correct ideas!” the parrot squawked.

  Michael Chen looked over at the bird as if it were something he might soon choose to discard. “This insect belonged to Bart Neville, the only Maoist parrot in the United States. It brings to min
d a certain Monty Python routine.”

  “ ‘The Dead Parrot,’ ” Admiral Wicks suggested.

  “Yawk!” the parrot objected. “Socialism is science!”

  Michael Chen frowned and leaned close to the chicken wire. “If it was science,” he enunciated clearly, “how come they didn’t try it out on rats first?”

  The bird didn’t answer and Michael Chen turned back to Jack Liffey. “What can we do for you?”

  “I was hoping to ask a favor but you don’t look set up yet.”

  “Don’t worry about all this geeked-out mess. We’ve got a killer machine up and running next door.”

  “Remember what you did last time?” They’d hacked into a Tokyo computer room and launched an elegant little vendetta that they insisted would live forever in the annals of computer prankery.

  Michael Chen came alive at the memory and did a little dance around the wheelchair as Admiral Wicks put up a hand for a high five. “Do we!”

  “Bonk!”

  “Oik!”

  “Bonk!”

  “Oik!”

  Maeve watched them celebrate with her jaw dropped an inch. He was used to them and their cyber-rites by now. He thought of them as the children of the New Age, kings of their own universe, and he liked the fact that it made no difference to them whatever whether you approved or understood or not.

  “I’ve got one little favor, and one big favor if you’re up to it.”

  Michael Chen stopped in his tracks. “If we’re up to it?”

  “It’s another telephone job.”

  “That’d be Michael,” Admiral Wicks said. “He’s the phone phreak. I’m languages. And soul, of course.”

  “Come with me,” Michael Chen said to Jack Liffey.

  “Maeve Liffey,” Admiral Wicks summoned.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “How would you like to be an alpha tester? We have a nice educational game we’re debugging. We hope to find a niche in education for our vast talents, and help dehose this poor company.”

  Jack Liffey left his daughter behind and followed Michael Chen down the hall to a room labeled EAST HYPERSPACE. The room was only relatively tidier, but it had what appeared a working computer with stacks of addon electronic boxes and two very large monitors. The desk around it was littered with Lego space capsules and an open jar of Jif with a spoon in it.