The Insides

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  The third detective looks away, seems to take a moment to summon something from some reserve, and then turns back to her. “Yes,” he says, “your friend was shot and killed early Monday morning outside of his apartment, in Brooklyn.”

  “Jesus Christ,” says Ollie. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  And right there at the table, she cries. Once she starts it feels like she might not be able to stop. The cop looks down at his own hands in a practiced way while waiting for her to finish; after what seems like a long time he gets up and heads out, eventually returning with a box of tissues that he found somewhere. She clutches it, turns it in her hands, as though it were a piece that had fallen out of her life. As though if she revolved it in just the right way she could snap it back into its original position, return it to its place in the original configuration, and then the whole thing would miraculously start working again, as though nothing had ever happened, and everything would be OK.

  Instead she’s in the police station for two more hours of questioning. By the time they’re done with her she feels completely hollowed out. She rises from the chair, rubs her temples, rolls her shoulders. Checks her phone. Loads more messages from everyone, but there’s one specific one she’s hoping for, and she finds it. It’s Ulysses again: IN THE LOBBY. COME FIND ME.

  And she walks through a set of doors and there he is. She still doesn’t know exactly how she’d describe the nature of their relationship but right at this moment she’s simply grateful to have someone in her life who is large, solid, someone who can serve, literally, as support. She walks into him the way one would walk into a wall. He manages to turn it into something that might pass for an embrace by getting his arms up and around her.

  “I’m so glad you’re safe,” he says.

  She clenches her eyes shut.

  “I’m so glad you’re safe,” he says again, lower, murmuring it into her ear. She doesn’t feel safe. She pushes into him harder, as though the way to safety might somehow involve moving through him, breaching the boundary that keeps them apart and distinct, winding up inside one another.

  They stand like this for a minute, pressed together, half-embraced, until finally Ulysses says, “Um, cops kind of freak me out. Do you want to get out of here?”

  Yes. Yes she does.

  “Do you want to go home?” Ulysses asks her, once she’s situated in the front of his big old Buick.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “No. I don’t know. I don’t think I’m safe. That guy’s still out there, still here, in the city somewhere.”

  “You think he might be after you? You specifically? People online are saying botched robbery—”

  “Probably it is, yeah. But I don’t think it’s just, like, a random robbery. This guy wasn’t just trying to grab cash from the till. He was after something specific. And the fucked up thing is that I have it.”

  “You have what?”

  “The thing the guy was after.”

  “Yeah, I get it, but what is it?”

  “It’s a knife.”

  “A knife? You think this guy shot Angel over a knife?”

  “Angel and Guychardson.”

  “Wait: Guychardson?”

  “You know him. Haitian guy?”

  “Short?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That guy got shot?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Yeah. Maybe some other dudes, too; I’m not totally sure.”

  “Over a knife?”

  “I think so. It’s a special knife, I think.”

  “What’s so special about it?”

  Ollie thinks about this for a minute. How to explain it. Ulysses doesn’t really believe in magic. She remembers exactly when she told him that she was a practitioner: a warm night, last summer, when she was living with him at his homestead. The two of them had gone through half a box of wine and she had begun to feel big confessional feelings; she had admitted that part of how she’d captured his eye in the first place was by committing a tiny act of sorcery. It had felt incredibly shameful, to say it out loud—to essentially admit that she had manipulated him, against his will, without his consent—but he’d just snorted, as though she’d told him that she’d first chosen him because she thought they had compatible zodiac signs. After that she didn’t bring it up much with him. And yet she’s not sure she has any better explanation.

  “It’s magic,” she says.

  Ulysses just lets that hang there.

  “Look,” Ollie says, “You don’t have to believe that it’s magic. Just—just think of it as something that’s like super valuable. What’s the most valuable thing you can think of?”

  “Me personally?” says Ulysses.

  “You personally.”

  Without missing a beat, Ulysses responds, “A John Deere 5M series utility tractor.”

  “OK, cool,” Ollie says. “So just imagine this knife as a very tiny, very valuable tractor with unique properties.”

  “Magic tractor,” Ulysses says, trying out the idea.

  “Yes,” Ollie says.

  “Unique properties.”

  “Special powers,” Ollie says.

  “So what can it do?”

  At this, Ollie frowns, because she still isn’t exactly sure. “It can cut through space and time,” she offers, finally.

  Ulysses frowns back in return. “What does that mean?”

  “I have no fucking idea. But it’s what everyone keeps saying.”

  “OK,” Ulysses says, after a minute. “You wanted a strategy. Here’s a strategy: I drive you to the river, you throw the Goddamn thing in there, and we’re done with it.”

  “No,” Ollie says.

  “Why not?”

  “Guychardson thought that it was valuable. He thought it was valuable enough to risk his life over.”

  “Sure, but—he’s fucking dead now.”

  “Right, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong. And if this thing is so important that people are willing to kill over it, it just seems like maybe we should hang onto it until we know more.”

  Ulysses considers this. “So, all right, this guy, this killer, you think he knows where you live? You think he might show up at your place?”

  “Maybe.” She thinks. Fear begins to crawl over her as she adds up what she knows. “Guychardson got shot outside of his apartment, so this guy knew where Guychardson lived. That could mean that he has access to the Carnage personnel records or something. Definitely fucking possible.”

  “OK, so—let’s get you way the hell away.”

  “Yeah,” Ollie says. “Yeah. Let’s do that.”

  “How ’bout my place?”

  She thinks about Ulysses’s homestead, out in the middle of Goddamn nowhere, nothing if not way the hell away. She could go. There’s nothing really stopping her: she’s learned from her phone that Carnage is closed for the time being; no one seems exactly sure when it’s going to reopen but probably not for another couple of days at least. So she could go. A couple of days spent hiding out might be enough time to make a long-term plan. A couple of days might be enough time for the cops to catch the guy. She tries very hard to believe in the probability of that outcome.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Let’s do that.”

  “You want to swing by your place, grab some clothes or something? A toothbrush?”

  “Fuck it,” Ollie says. “I can get that stuff on the road. I think it’s safer just to go.”

  Safer just to go: this causes Victor’s name to pop up, an alert in her mind. If the apartment’s not safe, then he’s not safe.

  “I gotta call my roommate,” she says, fishing her phone out of her pocket for the thousandth time today.

  “Go for it,” says Ulysses.

  She dials. Victor answers.

  “Ollie,” he says. “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I mean, I think so. This whole situation is pretty fucked.”

  “No kidding,” Victor says. “Where ar
e you?”

  “I’m with Ulysses—we’re driving around Manhattan. I think we should—come get you? Maybe?”

  “What? Why?”

  “ ’Cause there’s some maniac running around shooting my friends, that’s why. And—this is going to sound crazy, but I think he’s after that knife.”

  “It’s not a knife,” Victor says.

  This gives Ollie pause. “What do you mean?” she says.

  “It’s not a knife,” Victor says again. “It’s a piece of a sword.”

  She considers this, imagines it as the tip of a sword, embedded in a handle. It explains the weird dual edge and the lack of a bolster. And she thinks suddenly back to Rufus, and his crazy theories, and she remembers that World Knives wasn’t the phrase that he used, it was swords: World Swords.

  “How do you know that?” she asks, carefully.

  “Well,” Victor says. “Let me back up a minute. Guess where I went this morning?”

  “I have no idea,” Ollie says.

  “Well, with everything so royally fucked, as it is, it would be uncharitable to force you to guess, so I’ll just tell you. I did what we should have done Sunday morning: I went to Manhattan, and found the parking lot where our old friend Rufus works, if working is the word you would use to describe someone who sits in a glass box reading Hermetic manuals all night. Regardless: I caught him at the end of his shift and I told him if he came to our apartment and told me everything he knew about magic blades that I’d make him the best breakfast he’d ever had. I told him I make an amazing popover. So let me just say it’s been a pretty interesting morning.”

  Ollie blinks. “Wait, is he there now?”

  “He’s here; he has popover in his beard; the whole thing really is magnificently disgusting.”

  “Did he have information about the knife, or the sword, or whatever the fuck it is? What did he tell you?” Ollie asks.

  Victor pauses. “To some degree I’d have to say it resists summary,” he says.

  “Jesus Christ, Victor, I’m running for my life here, you think you could just give me a straight answer?”

  “Straight’s not exactly my forte, my dear, but—wait—Rufus, don’t, we don’t grab in this household. Ollie, I am gathering that he has an interest in speaking with you directly. His hands are impossibly filthy so I’m just going to put you on speaker”—scuffling sounds—“and set the phone down right here, juuust out of reach. Can you hear us?”

  “I can hear you,” Ollie says. “Hello? Rufus?”

  “Monarchs!” Rufus exclaims. “Royals!”

  “Hi, Rufus,” Ollie says. “Can you slow down a second? Which royals?”

  “Warlock-Kings and Witch-Queens! Impossible monarchs of the oldest Europe! Europe before Europe! Time as tissue!”

  “OK,” Ollie says. She pinches the bridge of her nose. “I need a verb. Can you give me a verb?”

  “The Swords,” Rufus intones. “The World Swords. They forged the Swords to enact their will.”

  “All right,” says Ollie. “So they use the Swords to get what they want—but what in the fuck do a bunch of old world kings want?”

  “Ollie,” Victor interjects, “they’re kings. What do you think they want? They want to rule. They made the Swords so that they could rule the world.”

  “Look,” Ollie says. “I’m sure there’s something to be gained from this history lesson but mostly I just need to know one thing: Should I chuck this thing in the river or not?”

  “No!” Rufus exclaims. “Water won’t lose it. The primal Sword was sunk before—then found! Every schoolchild knows! The lake. The lake in the story.”

  Ollie’s scalp prickles suddenly. “What story,” she says.

  “Think monarchs,” Victor says.

  “I’m thinking monarchs,” Ollie says.

  “Think monarchs with swords,” he continues. “Monarchs with special magic swords that allow them to enact their will over an entire country—?”

  “Motherfuck me,” Ollie says, “you’re talking about King Arthur?”

  “Bingo,” says Victor.

  18

  MOVING

  The woman is moving. The woman and someone else. Maja can feel it happening, even in her sleep, like something snagging on silk, tugging. She stirs, wakes, sits up, presses her fingers into the corners of her eyes to remove the specks of morning grit.

  She probes at the roof of her mouth with her tongue. Dry: she hasn’t been drinking enough water these last few days. In the bathroom, running the sink, she works a hole into the polyethylene wrapping of the single-use cup the motel has provided, but when the vision of a petrochemical refinery begins to loom in her mind she just sticks her head under the tap instead. Swishes, spits, takes another swig and this time swallows. The faint taste of minerals in her mouth. Images of layered stone deep within the mountains to the north: a suitable basis on which to found a morning. A point from which she can work.

  She sits at the desk, spreads out the maps, tries to align her sense of the woman’s movements with the rendering that’s there in front of her. She puts her finger on a highway, considers it, moves her finger to a different one.

  The Archive looks at the names of towns, notes the ones that it finds funny.

  Once she’s reached a point of suitable certainty, she lets herself into Pig’s room. He’s still asleep, his breathing labored through his bruised and broken nose. He’d brought ice with him to bed last night, and now a clear plastic bag filled with water rests on his pillow, beached there, distended, like a jellyfish on a shoreline.

  “Wake up,” Maja says. Pig doesn’t stir. “Wake up,” she says again, a little more loudly.

  “Fuck,” Pig says. “What time is it?”

  “It’s not early,” she says.

  Pig groans, rolls over in the bed, pushes the bag of water away with the edge of his hand.

  “They’re moving,” Maja says.

  “They,” Pig repeats.

  “The woman. The knife. Someone else traveling with her, I can’t quite get it. A man. A friend.”

  “A bodyguard,” Pig offers.

  “I don’t know. Possibly.”

  “Where are they headed?”

  “North.”

  “That’s all you can give me? ‘North’?”

  “I’m not a fortune-teller,” she says. “I can’t give you the future.” The future appears to her as it always does, shapeless, inchoate, terrifying in its inability to be known by the precise location of its things. “But,” she continues, setting these thoughts aside, “I can tell you what’s happening now, and what’s happening now is they’re headed north.”

  “OK,” says Pig. “North.” He pushes himself upright, throws his bare legs over the edge of the bed, gathers the sheet around his waist. He’s not wearing a shirt and she examines his tattoos. On one shoulder, three heavy black bars, arrayed in a configuration that resembles a trident. On his other shoulder, a cross in a circle, again made from heavy, dark lines. Across his chest, a wild pig, in profile, head lowered, tusks up. Taken together as icons they create a sinister effect, the suggestion of coercive force.

  With any other client, she’d take this opportunity: read the tattoos, learn more about where he got them, when, why. She begins to do it, but the tattoos, like everything else about him, are clouded by a halo of noise, a history that’s been reworked somehow, cut up, spliced back together. She gets a vague sense of them as images on flags, being waved by hateful crowds—but the image is jumbled, low-quality, like video footage she might see on a news broadcast, shot chaotically in the midst of a scuffle.

  She could ask him. She’s not in the habit of using conversation as a way to learn about people’s backgrounds; she’s never had to do it so she’s never really developed the skills that are necessary. All the same, she recognizes that it is a thing that is humanly possible to do.

  Pig touches his nose gingerly, winces.

  “All right,” he says, blinking himself the rest of the way awa
ke. “They’re moving. Do we know mode of transport? Plane, train, what?”

  “They’re on the road, I think,” Maja says. “They’re moving fast, but not as fast as a plane would take them. And it seems to only be the two of them, so probably they’re in a car. I’d feel more people if they were on a train or a bus.”

  “On the road, in a car,” Pig says. “So we can catch up with them.”

  “They can’t drive forever,” Maja says. “They’ll have to stop somewhere.”

  “And anywhere they stop will be better than here,” Pig says, experimentally, as though checking the veracity of the observation.

  “I would say yes,” Maja says. “Most places that aren’t this city will confer advantage to us. Fewer people, lower density, less surveillance.”

  “Not as many cops.”

  “Not as many cops.”

  “OK,” Pig says. He smiles, showing teeth.

  19

  LIVING

  “So—so—so wait a second,” Ollie says. “Are you saying I have a piece of King Arthur’s sword? Excalibur?” She can feel the incredulous expression on Ulysses’s face without even having to turn to look at him.

  “That’s—no—that’s not exactly it,” Victor says. “Rufus says Excalibur is still where it should be. Where you’d expect it to be. Like, in Britain. But—there’s more than one.”

  “OK,” Ollie says, her head whirling. “How many are there?”

  “It’s complicated,” Victor says. “My laptop is open and I open a new tab every time Rufus says something and I have like twenty tabs open now. There’s this list he showed me, on this message board, it proposes there are five, maybe?”

  “Five!” Rufus barks. “Unstable number, inverted pentagram, superimposition upon the globe.”

  “So, listen, Arthur has the first one, the one Rufus calls the primal one, which, as you know, he uses to rule Britain. And France—it’s like an arms race back in those days; England has one so France needs one—so you have Charlemagne. Charlemagne fronts like a Christian, which is genius, ’cause to hear Rufus tell it it sounds like he’s actually the head of this enormous magical death cult—whatever—anyway, he’s got a sword, Joyeuse, which is basically the French equivalent of Excalibur. That’s the second one.”