Exploded View

by Sam McPheeters

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Two weeks earlier, over the long holiday dinner, Krista had described the entire plot of Mind Narc to Terri as if she’d never heard of the show.

  “You know, when I was your age, girls weren’t that into science fiction. Is this just something you like on your own? Or is this something the girls at your school watch?”

  “I don’t know. All my friends watch it. Stacy, Jean, Paula …”

  “I guess that’s good news.”

  “Good news? Why?”

  “Back in old timey times, kids who were super into sci-fi were the last ones to wind up kissing other kids in a closet.”

  Krista smiled but didn’t blush, saying nothing.

  Terri rose for the bathrooms, saying, “The correct answer is, ‘kissing is gross.’”

  In the bathroom, the over-lit faux-depression tiles hurt her eyes, and she found the first stall so spectacularly clean that she wanted to just stand there and admire the toilet for a moment. Not that she trusted public toilets. Hadn’t there been an Overlay magazine, a while back, dedicated just to the excreta of celebrities?

  She arrived back at the table to see their food had arrived. Krista sat hunched over. Terri thought she was laughing at the portions until she sat, seeing the tears streaming down her niece’s face.

  “Hey …”

  “They want to kick me off the swim team,” Krista blubbered.

  “Oh. Why?”

  “Because … of the stupid game …” she sniffled. “With the teacher.”

  “Strangers on a train.”

  “Yeah,” her shoulders hunched once in a sob.

  “Wow. That’s a rough break.”

  “They had a guy come from the school police, and he took me out of class in front of everybody.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they do.” A wave of anger flashed over her—anger at the LAUSD cops for humiliating a thirteen-year-old, at the poor kid’s teachers and administrators for presumably allowing this sad scene to unfold—so that it took her a moment to process when Krista looked up at her with tear-streaked cheeks and said, “Do you know anybody in the school police? Is there any way you could, maybe, fix this?”

  That afternoon, back in the Basement, Terri called up the shooting of Deo “Froggy” Sarin, wondering why a gang member would pick or accept a nickname far less scary than his real name. He’d been shot on the bridge that turned into Glendale Boulevard. Replay started at 4:20 a.m. on December 30, the bridge empty except for Froggy and a lonely street sweeper on its sad, eternal mission to make the city a little less dirty.

  Froggy walked south, a scrappy little guy hunched over in the rain. In the margin, his rap sheet and associations showed ties to two different trafficking groups, both managed by the IKDK SSKs, a mid-level gang set based around Pico-Union. He looked angry, probably brooding over whatever sorry set of circumstances had him on foot in the middle of the night. Below him, the dark waters of a storm surge rushed by in a blur.

  Farrukh approached from the south, dressed in a hoodie and face mask, impersonating his own future assassin. He walked directly up to Froggy, only drawing the gun in the last few seconds. The gun wasn’t homemade, meaning it surely would have had its serial number filed off. Froggy said something lost to time, there being no audio on the bridge. Farrukh raised the gun, firing once into the other man’s chest or shoulder.

  Froggy stumbled backward, tottering against the low pedestrian wall. Farrukh simply walked up, placed one hand against the wounded man’s chest, and gently shoved him headlong into the dark, rushing waters. Collazo had been right: there was probably no way anyone could survive a drop like that.

  She realized a lone coyote had padded halfway down the bridge toward them. The animal took in the troubling scene with a cocked head. She’d heard their calls almost nightly, back in South Pasadena; not the distant cinematic howls of wolves, but childlike yips that would set off all the dogs in the neighborhood. For an instant, the animal seemed to glance past Froggy and Farrukh to look directly at Terri, as if she really were a time-traveling ghost. She felt that familiar disconnect, momentarily forgetting where and when she was, watching the coyote turn and trot back to its own realm, wondering if she’d just been given some strange mystical message.

  ShotSpotter had caught the gunshot, but the hooded Farrukh had sprinted off a half minute before the first drone arrived on scene, skipping over the bike path and then doubling back to make a getaway under the bridge itself. She crossed over to the other side of the bridge, soaring downriver to see if there were any glimpses of anyone fleeing or floating. It was far too dark to make out much of anything. As had happened so many times before, she found herself wanting to stop and redo this scene, to give it a different ending.

  Remembering there’d been some tags on the shooting itself, she rewound again, placing herself back at the moment of murder, Froggy’s expression still one of startled rage. The first comment, by Collazo, was surprisingly professional, making an official note of Froggy’s rep file, noting his involvement with a punch-out crew a few years earlier, that he’d apparently been promoted to sex trafficking in the last six months. Then there were the follow-up comments, each tagged to the subsequent moment when Froggy fell into the unlit river:

  no muss, no fuss

  somebody should make a public service announcement out of this

  Self-flushing feces. I love it.

  For a half decade after the war, precipitation had almost stopped in southern California as the Earth grew dryer and colder. When the rains had finally returned to Los Angeles, they’d returned in force, the bizarre weather patterns of a wounded planet being one of the few realms too large and too complex to be fully understood or predicted. Storm surges became an annual trauma, conspiring with increased snowpack on the San Gabriel and Santa Monica mountains to convert the paved Los Angeles river into a channel for raging brown floodwaters four months out of every year. A news crawl at the bottom of her vision read TOURNAMENT OF ROSES CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS, 18 DEAD.

  Terri called Carla Morales, hoping she wasn’t waking her.

  “Not Carla,” Carla’s Dupe said.

  “Yeah. Tech question, Not Carla. Can EyePhones survive getting wet?”

  “Theoretically. It depends.”

  “On.”

  “It depends on how long they were wet, what was the context, what brand they were.”

  “Good to know.”

  The Dupe hung up on her.

  “Oh-kay.” She called up a Department of Water and Power engineer, yawning as she tried to phrase her river questions correctly.

  “In flood surges, tons of debris is going to come down the LA river,” he explained, “Chairs, shelving, tires, aluminum siding …”

  “… I actually need to know about what doesn’t get through. What could a human body get snagged on?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to tell you,” he said with irritation. “All those things are inorganics. With surges, we don’t get any non-wood organic material larger than a rat, and even that not so much. In fast-moving water, hard objects do a great job of battering soft, cellular objects. A human body would disintegrate long before it hit Long Beach. Maybe a foot might pop up, but unless it comes free of its shoe, we’re never going to notice it. And past Compton Creek, water speed is upward of ten to twelve miles per hour at over sixty pounds per cubic foot. So even if someone were looking directly at the outflow, they probably wouldn’t see anything, and even if they did, they certainly wouldn’t be able to retrieve anything they saw.”

  “Stupendous. Thanks,” she said, already disconnected, flexing her jaw in impatience.

  Terri stared at the wall. New conclusion: Froggy’s shooting was pride-based. Froggy had disrespected Farrukh, Froggy had died. No muss, no fuss. She’d seen this scenario enough times to know there were few boundaries to what a refugee man would do when sufficiently compressed. There was a sub-subgenre of cop films known as the “I Am A Man” video, with male refugees
tearfully or insanely asserting their manhood; snapping, shrieking, kicking over pathetic chai kiosks, attacking cops with puny fists, collapsing in the street, devoured by the disgrace of their social emasculation. All her poking and prodding around Farrukh’s last days easily supported this theory.

  She liked this about Basement work, that it allowed her to ponder problems four-dimensionally, adding duration to width, height, and depth. But there were frustrations here as well. For one thing, there was that strange powerlessness, the unfulfilled desire to act on history, even immediate history. It felt like something close to a trap, nearly philosophical in its revealed truth. The past is always more solid than the future is fluid.

  The next morning, she had herself driven to the Good Sam Medical Complex. She followed PanOpt’s curving blue arrows down a long, brightly lit hallway to a first floor conference room clearly bustling with pre-conference hubbub. In the welter of faces, she located a plump, dark man with a white overcoat and steel-rimmed EyePhones. Even if he hadn’t been wearing his uniform, even if she’d run into him on the street, she’d have known he was a home-grown American just by the way he carried himself.

  “Doctor Singh? I’m homicide Detective Pastuszka,” she said from the doorway with a broad smile, knowing that everyone’s shades would show her shield somewhere overhead. Can I ask you a few quick questions?” He returned her gaze with a bold formality.

  “Detective, this actually isn’t a good time …”

  “I know, and I’m sorry about that, but I just have a few questions about Farrukh Jhadav. You met with him here three weeks ago?”

  “I don’t recall him specifically, but I know exactly what this pertains to,” Singh said, nodding. “He’d gone to one of those web rooms that allows you to trace any relatives you may have. He found out that we were very, very distantly related, maybe fifth cousins or something, if there even is such a thing. I don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter. He was looking for money. They’re all the same.” The dozen or so other doctors in the room went about their own hushed conversations with showy nonchalance, examining the colorful wall charts, the floor, looking everywhere but at the two of them.

  “‘All?’”

  “Any doctor of East Indian ancestry will tell you the same story. Refugees try to establish some sort of familial connection with us to get a handout for money. Or food, or shelter, or clothes … anything, really. These guys are a dime a dozen.”

  “Anything about this particular guy that stood out?”

  “Really, I don’t remember. It was a quick conversation. I told him I couldn’t help, and that was that.”

  “Oh? Well. Huh. You know, my records have you two speaking in your office for twenty-eight minutes,” she said, trying to put it light and sweet, making it sound almost like a question. No need to drop the hammer in front of the man’s colleagues unless necessary.

  Singh looked momentarily startled, probably having assumed LAPD surveillance wouldn’t include window shots from public streets. It was a common misconception, a willful delusion. If you do something in full view of a public thoroughfare, when has that ever been off limits to law enforcement?

  “No, that’s incorrect,” he said. “But I’d be glad to show you my room macro.”

  He excused himself, and an older woman, also in a white coat, tapped her wrist. Terri beamed, hamming it up, saying, “Great, great, that’d really help clear things up for me.”

  They headed back down the hallway, but before they got to the stairs, he beckoned her into a side conference room, running his fingers through his hair.

  Singh paused a moment, then said, “A long time ago, maybe eighteen or nineteen years, a guy showed up at my office saying he was my second cousin, just arrived in the US on one of the airlifts. Turns out he really was my second cousin. He’d met my dad both times he’d gone over to visit before the war. We spent the afternoon talking, got some beers, I loaned him five hundred dollars to get on his feet. My wife nearly crucified me, even though the money wasn’t an issue. Turns out she was right to be concerned. This cousin started coaxing more and more money out of me, showing up more and more frequently. One day he arrived at my house—not here, which is where we’d always met—and it was clear he’d been drinking. I told him to ease off, and he … he didn’t exactly threaten me, but he sort of … lunged.”

  “Lunged.”

  “He, you know, took one menacing step toward me really quickly and started laughing. It was nothing, really, but my wife was in the room, and she wanted me to contact a bodyguard service. Then it didn’t matter because we found out he was dead.”

  “Found out how?”

  “My wife had already set up a face alert, so she got the notification and called me at work.” A trio of doctors passed in the hallway and Singh grew quiet.

  “Look,” he said, nearly whispering, “I did talk with Farrukh for a half hour. But I did tell him I couldn’t help, and that he was not to bother me.”

  “Must’ve been an awkward half hour.”

  “That was at the end. Before that, I just listened to his story, listened to his current situation, tried to coax details out of him about his daily life, his routines.”

  “Why listen if you’re going to kick him to the curb?”

  “Are you familiar with The Hand Of God?”

  She thought about asking if that was the church in Crenshaw, felt stupid, and instead shook her head.

  “It’s a charity group. A very select charity group. It’s for situations like this, so that a handout doesn’t look like a handout.”

  “Say what?”

  “If someone shows up, someone like Farrukh, someone wanting something, I dismiss this person with sufficient rudeness to make sure they don’t come back. Make it crystal clear. No handouts. Then I tag this person in Hand Of God and set up an account for a one-time windfall. Maybe they find a wad of cash in the street, or a winning scratcher, or someone reverse-pickpockets them. You’d be surprised at how many ways there are to help someone out without them ever figuring out what’s going on.”

  “And how much did you give him?”

  “A grand.”

  “That’s a lot of money for a remote relative you’re never going to see again. What made this guy so special?”

  “Nothing. I give away a grand, on average, once a month.” Seeing the look on her face, he shrugged. “I’ll make that much this afternoon. Look. Barring some kind of calamity, I’m going to retire in May. My wife retires in July. Our house goes on the market, our furniture goes to one of those auction places, and we are gone. We have a sixty-four-foot yacht that’ll get us to Polynesia. We’re going to spend the rest of our lives far, far away from all this.” He motioned to the hospital, and the city. “And when I do physically interact with civilization, it’s going to be at marinas or ports of call where there won’t be any refugees. So why not help while I still can?” He paused, then said, “Is he dead?”

  “I’m homicide. So, yeah. Shot dead in a parking lot, Monday morning.”

  “Huh,” he said, as if she’d told him the elevator was out of service. “He was a hard guy to say no to, I’ll say that for him. Worked his ass off. No days off. He told me about what happened in Panama.”

  She played dumb. “What happened in Panama?”

  “There were five of them, him, his brother, his brother’s three girls. They walked up from somewhere ridiculous, maybe … Argentina? I forget. Camped by the side of the road, got robbed more than once, foraged and raided dumpsters along with everyone else flooding north. This went on for months, so by the time they crossed over into Panama, one of the girls was already sick. Probably, from what he told me, either malaria or HVFV. They camped out within view of the canal, and he set out to find a pharmacy, to try to scrape up something for the sick girl. When he got back to the campsite, there was a note to meet them at such and such a dock. When he got there, there were only two girls, the sick one, and the youngest, the one born in an aid camp, Rujuta. The brother tol
d him, rather matter-of-factly, that he’d sold the oldest daughter for ferry space and a Red Cross parcel. They only had fifteen minutes before crossing. Farrukh went crazy, racing around the docks looking for her, but when it came time they just had to leave.

  “He said he had nightmares about her every night. Those were his words. ‘Every single night of my life.’ He was a hard guy to say no to. And then the sick daughter obviously died, and I don’t think the brother was doing so well by the time they’d settled. I think he died of strep.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said, dropping some of the sweetness. “Farrukh had a tattoo on his ankle …”

  “That was her. The daughter.”

  “Did you catch a name?”

  “Like I said, Rujuta.”

  “Wait a minute, he had the name of the remaining niece? The one who’s still alive?”

  “They’re very close. Or were very close. That’s too bad,” he muttered. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Detective …”

  “Hold up. Do you know anything about this daughter, Rujuta?”

  “Really, I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “There’s nothing Farrukh might have said to you? No clues to her whereabouts?”

  “I’d be glad to send you the macro, Detective,” he said, meeting her stare. “But I know far, far less about these people than you do. I don’t even care about them.” He smiled, stepping around her. “Helping them just helps me sleep a little better at night.”

  Doctor Singh’s debriefing turned out to be the high point of a go-nowhere day. Another six hours of dead ends had combined with Zack’s lack of enthusiasm into a toxic brew of apathy and sluggishness. When they walked into Uganda after dusk, she dragged a dozen open boxes with her, including three Basement views, a coroner’s report, and five transcripts. Each felt like a mystical weight, something her spirit would be chained to in the afterlife.

  Inside, she experienced a familiar type of déjà vu, where the bar, with all of its camaraderie and laughter, seemed like the only thing that was real, and the sidewalk, city, and planet outside all dull counterfeits. She took off her shades and the illusion evaporated. Only two tables, each flanking the front door, generated all the camaraderie and laughter. It was hard to tell if they all knew each other, although it looked like some sort of ongoing birthday celebration. From a booth in the corner, Miguel Hull waved them over. He sat sandwiched between two overweight Gang and Narcotics guys whose names she’d forgotten, everyone together but talking to others.