She remembered bending to vigorously dry her hair and when she straightened again, seeing that Gabriella sat on the edge of the bed, knees together, hands folded in her lap. Terri had known at that moment that something was wrong, and all she could think was that someone had died and that it must be Gabriella’s mother.
“I’m leaving you,” Gabby had said in a voice neither soft nor loud. Terri had leaned into the closet door and let herself drift to the floor, the bath towel bunching up around her shoulders. She was still living in the wake of this one sentence, its mystery, still sifting her memories for warning signs. In hindsight, the only clue had come years earlier, when Gabby had surprised her with an elaborate train trip to New Mexico. Terri had been startled at the level of detail and planning that had gone into the vacation. “I have lunch breaks,” is all Gabby had said by way of explanation, just the slightest peek into that separate, closed chamber of her personality.
Even that last time in the house—walking numbly through the property with her lawyer, a new set of acoustics to the bare floors, all the equity visible in bright, cheery swoops—Terri searched empty corners of rooms for clues. She liked to think of the house now like all those downtown condos; chemically scuttled, rendered unfit for occupancy by patient investors waiting out the years or decades until downtown property became viable again. Rendered unfit for further human habitation.
Of the two bits of video that had burned themselves into the back of her brain, Terri preferred the nightmare images from the India-China war to the moment when Gabriella had told her she was leaving. She tortured herself for this distinction, even as she knew everyone her age had some similar private shame, some recess of their personality where they hadn’t shown sufficient respect to the dead. She unwillingly followed this idea to its next conclusion. She remembered her wedding night, and the relief at actually arriving somewhere in life that could contain such happiness. But she also remembered that relief tempered with a new fear: she’d become someone with something to lose. So did that now make her someone with nothing to lose? She glanced over at the Chinese table, the last vestige of her old life. So she could still lose that.
She thought again of Quintiglio’s letters, wondering when she’d last checked her own civilian mail account. Slipping her PanOpts back on, she switched over to the Internet, finding the webroom for the apartment; another bleakly bare space with just a slender half-moon table, eerily similar to her own, holding a stack of letters. She hadn’t been here in weeks. Most of it was junk, envelopes that, when pinged, would blossom into vivid circles and squiggles and sales infographics. Toward the bottom of the pile, she saw an envelope marked,
Godzirra!!
Terri opened this without bothering to see which male coworker had sent it, settling back into the couch as the space before her went dark and then lit up with a mighty title, flat and non-immerse but still emblazoned across a terrifying huge screen;
Godzilla Bangs Mothra
The film opened with ominous music over a black, roiling sea, the credits rolling above an ocean storm. When the credits ended, the waters continued churning. She waited for the movie to start, and waited, finally fast-forwarding through another twenty minutes of rain and sea, chuckling at the weirdness of it. She resumed the movie as the storm reached land, as if the camera had crossed such a vast expanse of water it had delayed the film itself. A tsunami crashed up into streets, carrying boats and telephone poles in its wake, the spooky illusion of the intro shattered by all those obvious miniatures.
An immense Easter egg washed ashore. A reporter and his plucky little lady photographer attempted to figure out its secrets while businessmen cooked up schemes around the egg, everything bathed in the effortless, dapper charm of the Japan of one century ago. She fast-forwarded through pastel colors and more cheesy miniatures, yawning, thinking, One Chuckle, realizing she was acting just like her niece.
Of course, Krista would have already lost interest in the film. The entitlement of the next generation baffled and slightly scared Terri. Having grown up being able to change the ending of any movie or TV show they liked—no one under twenty watching anything more than twenty years old—they acted like they could alter anything they wanted, in any format. Zack had once told her that his daughters would only watch the new horror films, the ones with different scares for each viewing, and had no interest in any of the films that had scared him as a teen. To kids Krista’s age, anything not 3D-immersive was “keyhole.” She wondered whom she would talk to if she were actually going to do something about Krista’s suspension problem.
Back in the film, Godzilla entered. He stood and roared, that crazy crashing-metal scream that had scared her so much as a child. The beast stumbled through skyscrapers like they were made of cardboard, laying waste to flimsy toy war boats and tanks. Mothra arrived to a flourish of tacky porn music, wah-wah pedals flaring as engorged pistels and stamens sprouted from its fuzzy underside. Godzilla pressed his gray pruneskin against Mothra’s monstrous sex parts and the two rolled in the dirt, thrusting, Godzilla using his mighty tail as a prehensile phallus.
“Ick.”
Wasn’t Godzilla supposed to be about the atom bomb? She’d read that somewhere. Postwar science fiction of her generation had taken a sharply utopian turn, offering stories about jolly civilizations in far-off galaxies, spaceships hovering over lush valley meadows a billion light-years away. Those tales had served as relief from the grinding horror of the daily news. These days, all the science fiction was about people performing strange feats of telepathy. So what did that say about today? Shows like Mind Narc projected a longing, she supposed; the stubborn opacity of people’s minds, resisting all the advances of the modern world.
The Walker was a different kind of sci-fi show. She wasn’t sure what cultural need that one fulfilled. Maybe the human longing to be nothing but an eye. Once, with some cop buddies, she’d rented one of those drones that scoured the Chinese and Indian wastelands for lost loot. She’d drawn a patch of Guangdong, one square mile of the four and a half million square miles now less habitable for humans than the ocean floor. And yet, after she’d buzzed around the pleasantly overgrown rubble, she’d turned to take in the low rain clouds on the horizon, and had been shocked to see a lone figure in the middle distance, one of an untold multitude still trying to carve out a life in the badlands. The tenacity of humanity captivated her. Even China and India themselves refused to completely die, continuing as governments eternally in exile, rootless but not stateless, moving themselves, cobblestone by cobblestone, into an entirely non-corporeal existence.
In the movie, the two monsters were still rolling their erotic horror across hills, flattening villages, smashing through power lines and parking lots and thousand-year-old temples. They kept rolling, through suburban streets, then the streets of Tokyo, colliding with skyscrapers that appeared far more realistic than those at the start of the film, sending cascades of glass down into the terrified crowds below. Godzilla arched his back in ecstasy and roared a plume of flame down into the surging mob, the soundtrack momentarily drowned out by screams.
The camera panned down slowly, leaving the two fornicating behemoths in the background. She was looking into a cavity formed by the crushed lobby of a department store, a wall of rubble draped over racks of clothing and sofas. The camera pulled down farther, resting on the reporter from the beginning of the film. He was kneeling, shirtless, blood covering his head, a huge gash in his back. Before him lay the body of his feisty little photographer assistant, the lower half of her torso torn to shreds. His shoulders lurched, wracked with sobs, the camera closing in on his face. He looked up at the viewer and the camera pulled in even further to follow one tear sliding down the gray dust on his cheek. A title read, THE END.
“What?” She tagged the movie with a note,
One chuckle. Try again.
But when she went to send it, the address came up non-deliverable. She hiccupped a second chuckle, trying and failing to recall anyone
who had her home mail address.
Terri thought she’d dreamed of Godzilla, but in the morning, she saw it was just the winds crashing through the neighborhood, scattering huge brown husks of palm fronds across the street below. After breakfast, she sat at the kitchenette’s lone chair and pondered. Motive. Four victims, three shooters, one gun. On a nearby notepad, she attempted to compile a list of victim similarities, writing, Lived in county and then crossing this out when she remembered Stacy Santos. Could there be some way PanOpt could compile any meaningful version of what this list should be? She wrote, Spoke English and Required food. She scratched her neck, adding, Biped humanoid.
Motive. Why did Nuestro kill the District Attorney’s daughter, and she kill Farrukh, and Farrukh kill Froggy? Who could profit from this? How could someone profit from this? Who could leverage an act of—what? Serial suicide? Back at Rutgers, in her sophomore year, she’d taken a class called One Hundred Years Of Crisis. She remembered reading about the Siege of Mecca, how one group of Muslims decided that everyone else was wrong, marched into the holy of holies with assault rifles and held hundreds of pilgrims hostage. A “malfunction,” her teacher had called it. There seemed to be something similar here, although she didn’t quite have it sorted out yet. People malfunctioning and then convincing other people to malfunction along with them.
Terri reclined with a sigh and thought again of Farrukh, the crucial link in the chain. She went back to the Swap Meet and caught him as he crossed the street toward the parking lot, headed north to his hole in the ground. Even here, in the last minute of the man’s life, he appeared drained, fifteen years older, with sharp crescents chiseled beneath both eyes. It had become her mantra: this was Farrukh’s case. Except she’d never before taken more than a passing interest in any of the literally hundreds of hard-luck nobodies that’d crossed her docket in years past. So why him?
Perhaps Farrukh’s case held an extra resonance because of their one shared biographical detail. They’d both traveled across a continent for work. The thought of setting out on foot filled her with a strange weariness, her own trip having been made on a Jobs Caravan bus, taking her three thousand miles from Manhattan’s Port Authority to the LA Greyhound Station. It hadn’t been cheap: almost all of her savings for a trip with a nominal guarantee of safety, three buses with an armed security escort for their pre-arranged food and fuel stops. She’d never been west of Pittsburgh, and spent hours viewing the hugeness of America—its sheer distances, the extraterrestrial vastness of the plains—through a scratched bus window, the caravan taking wide detours around the chaos of Indianapolis and St. Louis. Even though it was late spring, a mean frost had clung to the windows, and the few times she’d stepped outside to stretch her legs she’d been struck by the stinging cold, its rawness, wondering how exactly bad an omen this was for a life-changing trip to Los Angeles. But it’d warmed some in Arizona, and by the time they’d reached California, half the bus of pilgrims was wearing shorts, dazed by the tropical opulence, the orderly rows of palm trees, their own survival after a passage through America’s shattered midsection.
The bus trip had been a bittersweet triumph, a fresh start in the middle of what seemed like bottomless ruin. At the time, she’d had no way of knowing that the worst was nearly over, that she was three years into a four-year emergency. Even with all the privations of the Dim Ages—brownouts, uncollected garbage, and encroaching rats, the year summer vanished—the camaraderie of that era was still something she cherished. When America finally proved its resilience, jumpstarting farming and abandoning petroleum, all that solidarity had evaporated with frightening speed. To this new generation, it was as if those years had never existed.
Her mother had bought a handgun the first day stores were open after the war. She’d had to discretely flash it a half-dozen times, keeping it by the bedside when she slept. Those nights in that house still felt dreamlike, bathed in a sheen of dread. She remembered lying on her childhood bed, a cinema studies major with no future, listening to every little sound from the darkness outside. Terri had only left for the west coast after her aunt had moved in. It was funny to her now; she’d found guns so distasteful that she’d never once touched her mom’s pistol.
The pass-around gun was key. Where was it? Who had it now? How did Farrukh get it? If Froggy had used the gun, he knew how to cover his tracks. Even his death had covered up for itself. For all she knew, he’d floated out to sea and his stiff, crucifix-posed body was halfway to Hawaii by now.
Farrukh was still up in front of her, paused at T-minus one minute to death. His clothes looked rumpled, slept in. Even after growing immune to so many of life’s horrors, she still found herself continually bushwhacked by the sheer immensity of feudal poverty in refugee Los Angeles. If only he still had the EyePhones she’d seen in past footage, not the flimsy disposables he’d died with, she’d be able to get him a morsel of justice.
An insight came to her. Farrukh had been simply too poor to discard his EyePhones. He had a niece: she must still have them. Terri laughed at the obviousness of it all.
She looked back at his face, frozen in its display box, and addressed the deceased directly.
“I need your shades.”
As if he’d somehow magically heard her, Zack called fifteen minutes later in VT, just as the coffeemaker made its last final put-put noises from the kitchenette.
“Got a buddy here for you.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Liney stumbled in. Says he has some intel. I’ll leave you two to chat.”
“You don’t want in? Where are you?”
“I’ve been at the train station since First Ride. You didn’t seem particularly interested in obtaining justice for Mr. Orozco, so I’m waiting it out with an LAS Deputy. Thanks, by the way, for telling me you caught the Santos killer. Good work on keeping me up to date, partner.”
She blushed, wondering how he’d pieced it together so quickly. “That was supposed to be Babs and Ruben’s thing.”
“It is, publicly. So extra thanks for turning them into heroes. They’ll probably get a ticker-tape parade by the weekend.”
“Yeah.” It hadn’t crossed her mind that she’d transformed two shitheads into champions.
“This is what happens, Terri. This is what happens when you spend all your free time working. You crack a big case without even considering who it is you’re making look good.”
“Huh?”
“So maybe take this one to heart, you know? Ease up. Don’t do other people’s jobs for them.”
She wasn’t sure how to read this. “Okay.”
“Just tell me one thing. Santos didn’t turn out to do with the Hackley boyfriend serial killer angle you fed me, right?”
“Kind of,” she stammered. “It’s complicated.”
“Yeah, so’s this. I gotta get back to the station. Fill me in tomorrow.”
“Wait, where’s Liney?”
“He’s in an interrogation room at First Street. And make sure he understands that he can keep the disposables. No one wants those things back after they’ve been on his skanky eyes.”
She switched to the First Street workstation interrogation booth, finding Liney sitting patiently on a stool. Someone had provided him with a glass-bottle Coke and disposable shades and let him be. He’d apparently arrived wearing a stained polyester Santa hat he’d found somewhere, and a black eye, which she’d assumed everyone at the workstation had had to ignore. He looked perfectly contented, sitting with one leg folded over the other, hands crossed primly in his lap.
She dropped her VT into the picture, saying, “Okay. Whattya got for us, Liney?”
“Ah, Liney has been asking many questions.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Liney has … two pieces of information!” he said, smiling in a way that seemed slightly demented. She recalled that Zack usually handled these street briefings, wondering how she was supposed to respond.
“That’s great.”
“Line
y has been busy,” he said, swilling his soda and staring off in blissful contentment. She sighed, looking back to her open Basement box.
“So. Whattya got.”
“You want EyePhones for Farrukh Jhadav.”
“How’d you know that? You have them?”
“Liney knows.”
“Look …”
“Floor and building.”
“What floor and building?”
“Floor and building for Rujuta Jhadav.”
“That’s a good start. Got an address?”
“Floor and building.”
“Okay. Time out. I have no idea how Zack handles you, or how his payouts go. So you need to tell me in plain, first-person English what you want for what bits of info. Bearing in mind that overtime no longer exists in my world, thus throwing the supply and demand of our limited relationship way the fuck off balance. Roger, kemosabe?”
Liney made eye contact with a preposterously drooping lip. He pointed down toward his lapel, to a two-inch button for Shakey’s Pizza.
“You get paid in Shakey’s Pizza credits?”
He nodded.
“Pizza wampum. Really?”
He nodded.
“Okay. You give me Rujuta, I’ll give you …” She bit her lip. “Two hundred bucks. What’s that, four dinners? Two with a date?”
He smiled in contentment.
“333.”
“Got a floor?”
“Ah, Liney does his work.”
“That pizza is growing little angel wings and flying off to Heaven.”
“Forty-six. North East corner.”
“Huh. Nice if it’s true.”
“Liney has more.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Rujuta.”
“Yuh huh.”
“Rujuta scarred. Like so.” He drew a diagonal line from his lower chin to left temple.
“No shit.” She was surprised that Dr. Singh hadn’t brought this up. “Okay.”
“And Liney has more.”
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