Like a Boss

by Adam Rakunas

But this man here, if he didn’t genuinely care about the people under this roof, then he was putting on the greatest dramatic performance in human history. People smiled at him. His eye got moist as he hugged them and fed them and helped change a diaper.

  My brain did a backflip at that: Evanrute Saarien just changed a diaper.

  His suit remained spotless.

  “How did this all happen?” I said. We sat at the front of the building, bowls of stuff resembling lentil soup on our laps.

  He smiled, a bit of tomato wedged in the gap between his teeth. “It was in prison. Have you ever been to Maersk?”

  “I’ve tried to avoid it.”

  He shook his head. “That’s how I felt when the airship dropped me off. The criminals who get sent there are the worst of the worst, the ones who had no business being a part of society. I was sure I would get murdered within two minutes of landing.”

  Saarien put down his bowl of soup. “But it wasn’t like that. If anything, it’s harder. The guards and the prisoners have to work together to grow crops, to keep the water flowing, to make the place thrive. Three hundred people on a patch of land that’s only five hundred hectares, and if you don’t get with the program, you don’t eat. There’s no black market, no underground trading, because everyone’s busy repairing fishing nets or manning fishing nets or gutting fish.” He shook his head. “I’m not a fan of fish anymore.”

  I ground my jaw to keep me from yelling, Why aren’t you still there?

  He put his hands in his lap. “Everyone talks, too. We talk while we work, we talk at meals, we talk during sessions. We have plenty of time to reflect and think about what we did. I thought it was all bullshit until my second year.”

  I shifted in my seat. “What happened?”

  He gave me a small smile. “I realized that I was all bullshit. Everything I’d done, it was all for my own purposes, starting with me becoming a recruiter for WalWa. I just saw people as units to process and take advantage of. I was so disconnected from humanity, even after I Breached, and I couldn’t let go of that. It took going to prison and losing all my power to remind me that I was a person, and I had to rely on other people, and to do that I had to earn their respect.”

  This all sounded like a great line. I nodded, waiting for him to show me a sign that it was all nothing but a line. “Is that how you got out so early?”

  His eyes grew sad. “I didn’t want to go.”

  “What?”

  He nodded. “There was a structure and a peace that came from living and working there. And the fact that all of us had to talk and listen, that made it clear that I’d lived my life the wrong way. I did all the talking, but I never listened. I never thought about what I had to do to make others’ lives better. I was elected to leave early and bring that attitude back here.” He held out his hands. “I’m starting at the bottom with this.”

  “With a church?”

  “Faith without works is dead,” said Saarien. “I still have faith in The Struggle, but I know it has to start in here.” He pounded the center of his chest like he was hammering nails. “I found something I can’t put into words, but I can put it into action.” He blinked, like he’d just been poked in the ribs. “Speaking of action, it’s time for the five-thirty service. Can you stay?”

  NO, I wanted to scream at the tops of my lungs, not with Six O’Clock looming. No way in hell. But I hadn’t seen Sammy yet, and I had to get something to bring back to Keiko. I looked at Sirikit. “Can you get me to Samarkand Road before six?”

  She furrowed her brows. “We can stay ten minutes.”

  I turned to Saarien. “I have an appointment, but I can stick around.”

  He smiled, showing me that gap. I wondered: had someone knocked his tooth out? Had he just let himself go until he found whatever it was he was about to preach? I could figure that out later, right after I found out about the missing kids.

  Saarien walked to the front of the room and clapped his hands. “Has everyone gotten enough to eat?” There were calls of varying enthusiasm. Maurice and Diem, the couple he’d pointed out, took extra helpings of soup and sat down in front. People appeared from back rooms and from the front doors. Within a few minutes, thirty people had filled the benches. A third of them had ink. None of them were Sammy or Ly Huang.

  He stood in front of the altar, took a breath, and, for a moment, I saw the same Evanrute Saarien who had tried to kill me: the rolled-back shoulders, the slick smile, the suit. Then he exhaled, and all that confidence drained out of his body. He deflated into the smaller, sadder version that had ushered me in here.

  “Friends,” he said, his voice just strong enough to still the crowd. “It’s been a tremendous week for our flock. We’ve gotten new donations of jellied eel from Beckton’s, and I understand our PV Committee will be installing some new cells this week on the Wisniewski’s house.” A young couple with a baby waved at everyone.

  “Yes, a good week.” He nodded to himself, let his eyes drift toward the back walls. “And there’s always more we can do. There’s more we must do, and not just here in the city, but for our brothers and sisters in the kampong. They’re the ones whose toil lets everyone live. The more cane they cut, the more money flows back to us.” He focused his gaze on a Freeborn woman in the front row. “Though we know that’s not quite true, right?”

  Everyone nodded. The murmuring took on a hotter tone. I could feel it right away: these hungry people were angry. I made a mental note to feed all this footage to every Ward chair and remind them they were falling down on the job.

  “No, it’s not true. If it were, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be in our flats, at our jobs, maybe knocking back a few fingers of the Co-Op’s finest.” The anger grew sharper, not only on Saarien’s face, but on everyone else’s.

  Saarien held out his hands to still the crowd. “But what can we do? What should we do?”

  “Protest!” yelled the mother.

  “March!” yelled Maurice the welder.

  “Fight back!” yelled a man with a beard down to his navel.

  More words floated around, until a girl from the back called out “STRIKE!” Saarien pointed at her, his face lit up like a Diwali firework display. He nodded, and then that smile returned, the one that said everything Saarien had told me was, indeed, bullshit. He was back in the game.

  Sirikit leaned over. “We have to go if you want to make your six o’clock.”

  I looked at Saarien, getting ramped up about The Struggle, about how the cane workers did the most important work but got the least in cash. He was rebuilding, and he would try and kill me again. I could feel it.

  But I could also feel The Fear scrabbling around my brain. I got up and hustled to Sirikit’s tuk-tuk.

  FIVE

  “You want me to stick around?” Sirikit asked as we pulled up to Number 42 Samarkand Road. “I have the feeling you’ll have more places to go.”

  “Not tonight.” I hopped out, and shadows from the koa tree in front of my building wrapped around me. Three of the Patil kids stuck their torsos out of their window, right next to mine. They waved and sang until their father, Swaroop, called them to stay away from the fire escape and come to the dinner table. I smelled roasted kumara and fishcakes and heard arguments and prayers. I walked to the empty front stoop and patted the spot where the late Mrs Karpinski used to sit and smoke. God, I missed bullshitting with her. I blinked up the time: five fifty-five. “But tomorrow, probably, yeah. Around four-ish. And tell Jilly she needs to get out of the office.”

  Sirikit honked the horn. “I’ll send the boss your regards.” She zipped off into traffic, and I ran five flights up to my flat.

  Once inside, I didn’t waste any time. I locked the door and went to the kitchen. The bottle of Old Windswept sat in the back of the cupboard, hiding behind the spices. I could have left a case of it lying around, but, you know, old habits. I walked around the flat, closing all the blackout curtains but for the one covering the window facing the ocean. I set t
he bottle on my dining table and pulled a hurricane candle and a matchbook from underneath. I blinked up the time: five fifty-nine. I closed the last curtain, giving a nod to the mourners filing out of Longxia Cemetery a block away and cursing my landlady for saying the flat had a “territorial view” instead of “a living room overlooking a bloody graveyard.” I lit the candle.

  And there I sat: bottle, candle, the dancing flame. My little room, now bathed in the warm glow. Me, sitting in this chair, at this table, in this flat, in this neighborhood, in this city, on this planet, in this system, in this cluster, in this galaxy, in this universe. I let myself drift outside my tiny frame of reference, let my mind float farther and farther back until I was lost in the great sea of stars. I had no idea how many of them were full of life or strife, how many were being born or dying. I knew I had a place somewhere in all of that, and I had a short span to make it count. I had this time, this place, and this one sip of Old Windswept.

  I unscrewed the bottlecap and took that tiny sip. The warm line of rum ran down my throat into my belly, and I imagined that heat shooting up my spine into my brain. All those spots that got screwed up by my transit, all those neurons fried by the hibernant or business school or bad luck, none of that mattered for this moment. Here and now, I was whole and healthy, and fuck you, The Fear.

  “That looked delicious.”

  I jumped out of my chair. Rum sloshed out of the bottle as I held it in front of me. A woman sat in my overstuffed chair, her hands on the armrests. I did a quick look behind me to make sure no one else was hiding in my flat. I moved to the nearest curtain and threw it open. When I saw who was in the chair, the bottle dropped, along with my jaw.

  Leticia Arbusto Smythe, the President of the Santee Anchorage Chapter of the Universal Freelancers’ Union, gave me a polite smile, her un-inked cheeks glowing. She uncrossed her legs, her cargo trousers rustling and clinking. She had her electric green hair tied up, a sign that this was a business call. That still didn’t stop me from saying, “What the fuck are you doing in my flat, Letty?”

  She reached into her jacket and produced a cigar. “Your landlady let me in.”

  “I’ll have to file a complaint with the Housing Committee, then. No one’s supposed to come in here without my say-so.”

  Letty shrugged as she fiddled with a matchbox.

  “Or smoke.”

  She glared at me. I shrugged. “It’s in the lease.”

  Letty hmmed, then tucked the cigar back in her jacket. She nodded at the bottle on the floor. “You gonna waste that?”

  I looked down. Old Windswept came in triangular bottles of sea-green glass. This one was open. Once upon a time, I would have dived for the floor to keep any of the rum from spilling, but I had learned that, once you owned your own distillery, that kind of thing just wasn’t done. I picked up the bottle and put it away.

  “Not even a finger for the Prez?” said Letty from her chair. My chair.

  “I’m always happy to serve my guests,” I said, closing the cabinet. “My invited guests.”

  She laughed. “Oh, come on, Padma. You still owe me a drink.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since that night you dragged me to karaoke.”

  “First of all, that was nine years ago. Second, you dragged me to that crappy little bar. And third, you didn’t even sing.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t like the way my voice sounds.”

  “You give weekly speeches on the Public.”

  “That’s speaking. Singing is another beast. Besides, this was the only way we could talk without all the eyes and ears of the world watching us.”

  I tapped my temple. “We both have video cameras in our heads.”

  “But they don’t work when I have this.” She held up the matchbox.

  I blinked back my pai’s buffer and got static. I put my hands on my hips. “Letty, are you jamming me? In my own home?”

  “I am indeed.” She pocketed the jammer. “Because the Union needs you, Padma, but no one can know about it.”

  I walked to the door. “Thank you for visiting, I’ll be sure to take this into consideration come election time.” With a flourish, I opened the door and bowed low. “Now go home.”

  A woman in a deck jacket and work boots swung around from the door posts. Before I could react, she got between me and the door. I didn’t even have time to yell as she closed the door with a solid click. She put her back to the door and faced me, and I had the damnedest feeling of déjà vu.

  The woman looked my age, though her skin was so smooth that there was no way she’d spent any time in the sun. She had a LiaoCon Security Services tattoo on her cheek: a deep green dagger with a red merlion coiled around the blade. The inklines were crisp, like she’d only gotten it a month ago. She squared her shoulders at me, and her eyes said she would break me in half if I made a wrong move. There was no way she was a rookie.

  I threw up my hands. “This is some shameful shit, Letty. Breaking into my place, having your little thug keeping me from bouncing your ass on the street. You really want me to go to everyone else on the Executive Committee? Don’t you think Ly An Nogales would love to hear about you getting all power-grabby?”

  Letty tented her fingers and rested her elbows on her knees. She looked like an illustration from one of my B-school manuals about executive poise. “I think Ly An would do the same if she faced the same situation.”

  “Which is what?”

  She smiled. “Pour me a drink, and I’ll tell you.”

  I jerked a thumb at the woman guarding my door. “Tell your attack poodle to wait outside. She doesn’t look housetrained.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. She made a sound like a jet engine starting up as she uncrossed her arms.

  “No, it’s okay,” said Letty, holding up a hand. “Thank you, Jennifer. Please wait outside.”

  Jennifer’s upper lip twitched into a microsneer as she slipped out the door. I threw the deadbolt. “Where did you find her?”

  “Same place I find everyone else who’s useful: a bar.”

  I got a bottle of Beaulieu’s Blend out for Letty. Endless supply of Old Windswept aside, I wasn’t about to share my best with her, not after this crap. “Well, she certainly has a great tableside manner.”

  Letty moved over to my little table and blew out the candle. “She just came down the cable earlier this year. Interesting story: she was in personal security for some ag executive, and her boss wanted her to go out and rough up some tenant farmers. She punched out her boss, freaked out, and stowed away on the first outbound ship she could find.” She shook her head. “Four years later, she slips down the cable, and Little Charlemagne put her to work as a bouncer.”

  I put the bottle and two glasses on the table. “Is that why his place started getting good reviews? I know it wasn’t for his food. He burns water.”

  “She certainly changed the ambiance,” said Letty, eyeing the two fingers I poured in her glass. “Once she rousted out the troublemakers and bullies, it became a more pleasant place to hang out.”

  “Yeah, but pity wherever the troublemakers and bullies landed.” I held up my glass, and we clinked them. “To personal security; would that we all could have some.”

  Letty snorted and took a deep sip. I just mouthed my rum; it was too close to Six O’Clock to put other forms of alcohol into my system.

  She held the glass up to the evening light and swirled the rum. “You know, Padma, whenever the Executive Committee is kibitzing amongst ourselves, this comes up a lot. You and this hour of the day. Back when we were both Ward Chairs, I remember you kicking up a fuss because Ted Fantodji wanted to have a meeting at six. It almost came to blows.”

  I shrugged. “It just wasn’t a good time.” I was glad the jammer was there; it saved me the embarrassment of reviewing the memory, filed away on the Public for all to see.

  “But it’s never been a good time.” She tapped her temple. “I checked. You are always here at six o’clock, but for
a few occasions like hurricanes and dealing with Ghosts.” She took another sip. “Why the ritual, Padma?”

  I made myself laugh. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Letty put down her glass. “My mom was a canon. I grew up surrounded by bread and wine and all the stuff that transforms it. I know ritual when I see it, Padma.”

  “Is that why you came here? You got a bet with the rest of the Executive Committee about how I spend my time? Joke’s on you; I’ve actually been running a pit fighting ring.”

  She tapped the glass. “That’s why I like you. Even when you’re neck-deep in bullshit, you make with the funny.”

  I poured her another finger. “Madame President, why did you break into my home?”

  “Because I have something that needs fixing, and you’re the only one who can fix it.”

  Now I laughed for real. “If I had a hundred yuan for every time someone’s used that line on me, I could buy two distilleries.”

  Letty shot the rum and hissed in a breath. When she exhaled, she leveled her eyes and said, “Evanrute Saarien is going to destroy the world.”

  I took her glass and mine and brought them back into the kitchen. Deep in my gut, I could feel the acid roiling. There were only so many times you got to speak truth to power, and I had to make sure my next words were cool and clear. As much as I wanted to yell at her, I had to keep myself together.

  I placed my hands on either side of the sink and leaned down, as if the cool of the glass tile could keep me from boiling over. “Evanrute Saarien got that way because you let him.”

  Letty shook as if I’d slapped her. “What?”

  I kept pushing down on the counter, willing the tiles to snap under my weight. “I warned you and everyone else up and down the food chain that Saarien was, at best, full of shit whenever he talked about The Struggle.” Letty quirked her mouth; anyone who’d been around Saarien had gotten their fill of his rhetoric. “You had every opportunity to stop him, to cut his funding, to get him tossed from Sou’s Reach. I told you and I told you and you never listened to me.”