by Nik Korpon
“It’s fine, love. That…” I swallow, restart. “The Paradise was only a couple times, and that was a long time ago. I’m fine.” It was five years and eleven months ago. I lost several weeks in lagonael dens and on friends’ couches, vaporizing and watching the only memory I had of Aífe and Donael, trying to bring them back into existence through hallucinations and tears.
“You understand this is exactly why Forgall doesn’t trust you, right?”
“Don’t confuse doing a job with being one of them,” I tell her. “You should know better.”
She sets her fists against her hips, bristling at my condescension. “Then come to bed.”
“I will.”
A hard moment stretches between us before she exhales, her hair drifting aside. “Well, I don’t know if I can wait up for you. Tomorrow’s going to be busy.”
“I understand.”
And I do, but my dead family is waiting.
4
Walleus
“Can’t believe you left the house without your umbrella, Mister Walleus,” the man in the gatehouse says to me. “Might’ve gotten your new haircut all wet.”
“Good thing I can clean it with my hand, then.” I pat my bald head. “Work smart, not hard. It’s in my genes.”
We’ve had the same exchange every time I come home for the last five years and still he smiles like it’s the funniest joke ever told. Life in Eitan must be a lot easier with blissful stupidity like his.
The scanner and my car exchange their information, then the gate yawns open.
“Hopefully tomorrow will be a dry one,” he says, waving at Cobb as the car drives itself forward.
It navigates through Donnculan, each court’s name honoring a different Tathadann dignitary: judges, generals, politicians, police. If I’d been in charge of planning and development, I would have named everything after their whores, because no statesman can get anything done without the promise of some pussy once he’s finished.
Cherry blossoms line the main drive. Two small droids hover at the tips, pruning away the errant growth so that the branches will arch like a canopy over the sidewalks. Thick bushes with some kind of red flower keep the street out of everyone’s yards. A mother chases after her son who is going too fast on his bike, the training wheels rocking him back and forth. He takes a corner without any brakes and flips over, the handlebars pinning him to the concrete. She yanks it off him and he rights himself, wiping his tears and a bloody cut on his sleeve then taking off again.
This is the second section of the neighborhood I’ve lived in, the one with connected houses. When I first joined the Tathadann, they gave the boys and me a detached home two miles inside the gates – fully furnished and with a closet full of white suits so finely tailored to my body the old man had to move my balls aside to get the right measurement – sort of incentivizing my switch, or at least not making me feel like such an asshole about it, and looking sharp while I did it. Every third house had a fountain sitting in its front yard – which likely meant there were at least two more at the back, if not a pool as well. In here, there’s no landmarks in the landscaping or architecture, and all the houses are white. That suggested solidarity, they said. Our house was so far back that, if I hadn’t been issued a Tathadann car – one of the newer ones that drove themselves by radar triangulation – I would have had to track the mileage to remember where I lived.
As fast as my position within the party grew, from managing the water dispersal to wrangling intelligence and commoditizing memory, the size of my house shrank and moved closer to the community’s perimeter. Those suits got cheaper and came less often, too. At first, it pissed me off, but after a few drinks it occurred to me that I’d moved past the need for constant surveillance and they would finally leave me be.
At Mayhe Court, we swing left then drive to the end of the street, kids chasing each other around the asphalt circle.
Yeah, I live in a goddamned cul-de-sac now.
Cobb scampers up the sidewalk to the brick steps and hits the front door with so much momentum he tumbles backward. He stares blankly at the house like it attacked him. I step up to the sensor, say, “Open up.” The voice sensor is as bad as the biometric reader and I have to clear my throat and try twice more before it opens.
Inside, I call out hello but it echoes through the house, so I scrounge up some food for us. I throw containers of leftover roasted pork, potatoes au gratin, and poached asparagus in the top part of the dual-oven and tell it to warm up. “But not too hot this time,” I say. “You burned my mouth yesterday.”
I call out to Cobb, “Do you still want some chicken?” When there’s no answer, I assume he’s hungry and turn on the indoor grill in the center of the kitchen island of burners, put on a couple pieces of chicken and tell it to grill them medium.
While the food cooks, I go into the living room and draw the shades then press my hand exactly four feet above the seam in the carpet. The laser inside the wall analyzes my DNA, then there’s a pneumatic hiss beside the bookshelf.
The sudden interest in Riab’s family is a little unnerving, but I don’t really know who’s writing the orders, and Riab’s family seems a little small to concern Morrigan. What has me curious is Henraek mentioning the power substation, something I haven’t thought about in years. I’d say it has to be urgent for him to bring it up inside the Gallery, but this is also Henraek, the man who shot three holes in the door to our old apartment because the tumbler inside the knob kept catching. For a man who constantly bitches about his dealings with others’ pasts, he damn sure loves wallowing in his own.
I push on the wall and open up the panic room.
More than three dozen green and white scarves hang on the walls, some striped, some printed with mantras, some with notable dates or player names. Against the far side is a bookshelf crammed full of photo albums holding clipped articles that damned the raids, old pamphlets, blueprints of buildings and schematics of bombs. More albums rise like towers around the foot of the shelf. I installed the room myself after I’d been here a couple years. Even cloaked the reader by altering some old plans from a bomb-maker called Nael, rejigged to read only DNA related to mine, in case of emergency or an official stopping by for a surprise inspection. Seemed safer than hiding all of this under my old foul weather gear in the back of the closet.
I pop open the lid of the surplus bullet box, sift through the vials until I find the right one, then step out of the panic room, close the door, and seal it. I stick the vial into the projector unit that I jury-rigged up to the TV so it’d project from within the wall, creating a three-dimensional hologram – state-of-the-art twenty years ago when they built these houses, another vestigial benefit of Tathadann life – then let it boot up while I check on the food, forking the chicken onto a plate for Cobb.
“Your dinner’s going to get cold,” I yell down the hallway, then dump my food onto a plate, plop on the couch and hit play.
The power substation comes into focus, down in the distance. Giant green tubes extend from all sides of the building, housing the conductors that provide electricity to all the Tathadann offices, bars, and shops on the southeast side. No electricity, no communication capabilities. No communication, no way they could raise the soldiers when we went in to gut their headquarters.
A razor-wire fence runs the perimeter of the grounds. Twenty feet of bare dirt stretches between the fence and the tall reeds covering the floor of the valley. It’s all supposed to make it impossible to approach the plant unnoticed.
Unless you’re going at night, dressed in all brown.
And you have a schedule of the guards’ rotation and a fistful of bullets.
I’d told Henraek for weeks that this was a stupid idea. It would never work and he was leading us into the killing fields. He told me I would owe him two drinks for every side of the building that went. He was throwing up all the next day.
While Henraek led the team to the station in the distance, I stayed on the high ground,
tucked in between patches of reeds with a .50 caliber rifle mounted on a tripod at my feet. One of our plebes had a sister who had attracted the attention of the clerk working in a Tathadann weapons office. She kept him busy for five minutes – apparently she was as good as the plebe had boasted, though no one wanted to ask how he knew – and we relieved them of some heavy artillery. One of our soldiers, Fergus, brought out the new pulse cannons the Tathadann had developed, but I said to keep it old school. I sat up there half wanting something to go wrong so I could use the gun to mow down a line of the plant’s guards.
On the bottom left, the team creeps through the reeds, and from the zigzag pattern they take – a tactic Henraek would later be obscenely proud of – it only looks like a breeze through the barley. So far, there is nothing new, nothing different I notice from the hundred other times I’ve watched it, which doesn’t mean that I’m missing something as much as Henraek’s got a new bug up his ass, different from the usual one. When the point man reaches the dirt at the edge of the reeds, the floor behind me creaks.
I jump up, fork in hand and ready to stab.
He’s standing there with a large bowl in his hands.
“Goddamn,” I say, turning off the memory. “Donael, you scared the hell out of me.”
“I said hi when you guys came home. Didn’t you hear me?”
“No,” I say. “Obviously I didn’t.”
He looks at my dinner splattered on the carpet but doesn’t comment on it, then holds out the bowl of popcorn. “Want some?”
I shake my head. “Have you seen Cobb?”
“I thought he was tired so I asked him if he wanted to go to bed but he wants to read books.” He hops over the couch and sits in my spot.
“Where is he?”
He shrugs. “Reading?”
“Can you go get him? So we can have a family night? You know, for once?”
“Can we watch a movie instead?” he says. “Memories are creepy. I don’t want to end up like those freaks who can’t talk.”
I kneel on the carpet and scrape the food back onto the plate, picking through the threads of the shag to get the big chunks of asparagus and potato because the cleaning droid they gave us is old and will clog. “Do you want his dinner at least?”
He holds up the bowl like that should be an answer in itself.
“You can’t eat popcorn for dinner. That’s not very healthy.”
“There’s milk on it too. Well, butter.”
“I’ll bring you something real.”
I dump the food down the disposal and I leave the dishes in the dishwasher. There’s not much left in the fridge, so I take two mostly clean plates from the counter and drop some chicken on them.
I hand one to Donael then sit next to him on the couch.
“I think the popcorn would’ve been healthier,” he says, not looking at me but focused on the TV screen he didn’t even want to watch.
“What are we watching tonight?”
He shrugs and shoves popcorn and two bites of chicken in his mouth. “Something funny.” A chunk of chewed meat falls from his lips and lands in the shag. I lift my feet and call out for the cleaning droid.
After I upload a movie from the network I sit back next to him and listen to his crunching, consider my makeshift meal, drop it on the coffee table. He sets the bowl between us and rests his feet atop mine on the ottoman. I tell the system to play.
5
Henraek
As I lean out the window, Silas perched and preening himself on the ledge, I watch Amergin flicker until the noise in the bedroom quiets and I’m sure Emeríann is asleep. “Stay quiet, bud,” I say to Silas as I wave him in.
Hanging above the couch is Emeríann’s least favorite piece, the jaw of a dog attached to a bird skull with copper wire, beaded feathers wrapped around interlocking twigs and shards of metal. She’d wanted to take it down, saying it was trying too hard, but I told her to leave it, that I actually understood this one, which seemed to satisfy her.
In truth, it reminds me of Aífe and Donael in some oblique way. Possibly the dog jaw, for the way Donael would run around the living room chomping his teeth as he tried to bite us. I’d pull my arm inside my sleeve and roll around on the floor in ham-fisted agony, begging to get the lower half of my arm from inside the dog’s belly. Possibly the bird feathers and beads, for the way Aífe would sound like an exotic bird when I’d do an impression of Lady Morrigan dominating her husband Macuil and she’d laugh so hard she couldn’t breathe. Possibly, or probably, I like it for the way it tries too hard and yet still doesn’t work.
Quietly, I push back the couch then pry up a floorboard. Sitting beneath the floor is Aífe’s green and white striped scarf and a pistol with a barrel so clean it looks wet. Wrapped inside the scarf is a glass vial, the metal rings tarnished with rust. I set the memory viewer on a wooden crate before the couch and flip on the power to warm up, turning the volume knob all the way down. One of the men in my platoon was also a mechanic, and converted an old video recorder into a viewer using some solder and two magnetic rods. There are much nicer – and smaller – ones out today, but I’ve used this one so many times I’ve begun to associate it with the people it displays, as if my wife and child would be different people on an unblemished projection. Silas flaps to the arm of the couch and perches there.
I wrap the scarf once around my neck, place it against my mouth and nose, close my eyes and inhale. Hold it, hold it. Exhale and inhale again. Though it smells mostly of dust and thick air, a few tendrils of jasmine perfume still cling to the threads and if I focus hard enough, I can bring them out. Or maybe I will them into being. She’d worn the perfume on our first date, when I got us tickets to see the Hoep’s play, and I bought her a bottle of the same perfume on our first anniversary. After another quick inhale, I fold the scarf into thirds, then halves, then set it back beneath the boards. I know she won’t leave the bedroom, but the random chance that Emeríann might find me with Aífe’s scarf wrapped around my neck tight as a noose would warrant too much mollification, and she has dealt with enough already.
I don’t have enough energy tonight to survey the memories from Riab’s grandfather so I set the vial next to the scarf and go to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of bootlegged bourbon.
I sip it and inhale quickly through my nose, the burn nearly taking my breath away, then crouch next to the viewer and insert the vial. The electrodes crackle and light up. The lines of a football pitch materialize in the steam, the warbling crowd noise cutting through the hiss. I take a belt of liquor, suppress a cough, then lie on the couch. Silas wobbles his way to my lap. His coos reverberate in my chest and he might vibrate me to bits. I press play.
The stands heave with fans singing partisan songs. Players scatter across the field. Donael cheers when the blue player takes the ball near our goal and slips in a sneaky one early in the first half. I see myself telling him that those are our Hoeps out there, the green and white team, that it’s the people’s team and the blue guys are supported by the Tathadann party, but his favorite color is blue so he doesn’t care. Sitting next to me, Aífe tucks back a piece of her chestnut hair, her fingers long and slender. Piano player fingers, I’d call them, though she didn’t have a musical bone in her body. Her neck is pale and smooth and, even though I spent hours nibbling on them, I always forget how elfin her ears are. The striped scarf draped over her shoulders flutters in the breeze.
Since our first date had been at a Hoep’s match, we made it a tradition to come every year and sit in the same seats, bringing Donael in a baby carrier when he was young, then getting him his very own top – to match ours – as he grew. The fact that she wore perfume – the jasmine one – to a football match, combined with the way she put down her whiskey without cringing, was part of the reason I fell in love with her in the first place.
The field of vision goes back to the match. This memory came from my friend Séta, one of my sergeants who would come out with us. Later, after everythin
g went to hell, it took me an agonizing week to track him down.
Our team equalizes late in the second half with a goal through a series of clumsy one-touch passes that were saved only by the skill of Concho Louth, widely considered to be our Hoeps’ all-time best player, but Aífe’s breasts bounce as she celebrates the goal and Séta instead follows them with his eyes. Unimpressed by the on-field antics, Donael shovels fried potatoes into his mouth like he’s a giant monster and the wedges are helpless villagers. He pulls on my sleeve, chunks of potato hanging from his mouth. Aífe tells him that he’s gross, which only encourages him. He wedges two more in his nostrils and turns toward Séta for approval. Behind him, Aífe leans close to me and asks me to tell him not to encourage Donael. I can still remember the pomegranate scent of her shampoo, mixed with the beer, sweat, and the sharp smell of freshly cut grass. Séta watches us for an uncomfortable amount of time.
On the other side of the stadium, a finger of smoke twists between the blue jerseys in the stands. It’s military-grade plastique set by Tathadann loyalists with the intention of framing the rebels, though we didn’t know it at the time.
The game remains tied until the eighty-fifth minute when one of the opposing players breaks through our defense and notches the go-ahead goal. Our side groans. The Tathadann supporters erupt in song. Donael is so happy he grabs Séta’s coffee and throws it on a kid wearing a striped jersey then calls him a Hun. The memory fades out.
But three minutes later, Concho Louth scored the most famous goal in Hoeps’ history, collecting a cross with his chest and unleashing a deadly right foot into the corner of the net. Thirty seconds after that, during the celebration, Aífe flinched, as if she could sense it. Then the plastique exploded.
The following morning they reported on the explosion, blaming us. It wasn’t even the obvious bias that pissed me off, but the fact that they used my name when I had nothing to do with it.