During the entire monologue, Carla had skinned a tangerine in one peel, eating the fruit in two bites and then flopping the orange rind back and forth like a tiny animal hide, seeming more interested in the scrap of trash than the story. When the whole ridiculous tale was finished, she looked up from the peel and said, “What is it you want me to do?”
The question struck Terri as borderline autistic, a swell of self-pity welling up and washing over her before she got that it was a face-value sentence. What had she wanted from Carla?
“I guess … I need to know how worried I should be.”
“Do you mean from physical harm? I’d say very, based on what you just told me.”
“Okay. But, more precisely, I’m wondering … how reliable are my PanOpts? How worried do I need to be from the technical side?”
“I don’t follow.”
“Well, this maybe sounds crazy, but I don’t know if I can trust my PanOpts at this point.”
“If you’re in zero location, you should be safe from detection. Zack pretty much confirmed that last night, just before you were attacked.”
“What about the thing at my apartment? With the lack of surveillance protection?”
“Yeah.” Carla had carefully refolded the tangerine skin back into a mauled sphere. “That’s a puzzler. It’s not a slam dunk that this involved collusion on the Wall side, and if it did, it could easily have been just one rogue operator.”
“Is there a way that someone could have gotten into my apartment without technical support from up on high?”
“Well, anything’s possible, sure. I can think of some scenarios with trace blockers that would allow someone to pull this off. But that’s besides the point. There’s no logical motive here.”
“Okay.”
“You’ve got a cascade of situations that have no rational motive.”
“Yeah …”
Carla flattened the tangerine skin on the table’s free space, squashing it with one thumb. “So what you need to do is figure out what it is that’s happening. What about Farrukh’s EyePhones? The original ones?”
“I’d assumed the niece, Rujuta, would still have them.”
“Unless something’s happened to her, that seems like a safe bet. She’d guard those things with her life, even if they didn’t have all kinds of memories of her uncle on them.”
“But she’s gone. I hit a brick wall yesterday. If she’s still in the county, she’s faceless. I can only hunt her as far as she’s on the grid. If she was never on the grid, there’s no way for me to find her.”
“That’s not really true, though, is it?”
“How so?”
“Switch over to human intelligence. The odds are in your favor that she’s still in the city. All you have to do is reach out and find her.”
“Easier than it sounds.”
“It’s been done.”
They were silent for a moment and then something in Terri’s stomach audibly contracted. Carla tossed the tangerine peel into the trash can overhand.
“You do that. I’ll work the Nuestro end. You should be running both sides of this story.”
“Zack was trying to steer me off the front end …”
“So let me handle that part for now.”
Terri nodded. Carla suddenly raised her eyebrows and whistled, a high-pitched note that hurt Terri’s ears. “This is some shit. We need to act quick.”
Terri cruised downtown, trying to think, her car crawling, drawing attention to itself even in the slow lane. Five blocks in, her car got edged into the next lane out by an idling bus, its sides shivering and jiggling like cellulite. She passed a Salvadoran restaurant drenched in purple neon, the surging, dinging music coming through its open door sounding like the sped-up clang of a train crossing signal. On every block, men with nowhere to go and nothing to do stood on street corners or squatted in doorways, watching traffic, watching people with jobs come and go, solemnly observing the entire world slide by. They were vessels of inherited emptiness.
The contrast south of Ninth Street was jarring, not just because of streetwalkers and candy girls, but also from the sheer volumes of trash. The city’s anti-littering program had been a huge success in other parts of the city. Kids were encouraged to pick up debris in a citywide game where everyone got points for each piece of litter, each point tallied by the city’s grid of eyes, redeemable for treats at participating stores, JoyRide coupons, shirts, probably a whole small universe of prefab swag that would become next month’s litter. But the program worked, largely because people like playing games, and liked working games into their lives.
In downtown, none of the game’s demographic groups—children, pensioners, the chronically unemployed—had any way to play the game. They could pick up as much trash as they wanted, accrue as many points as their hearts desired, but at the end of the day they had no way to redeem anything. More importantly, they had no reason to trust that redemption didn’t mean any one of any number of mythical traps the city, state, or federal government was always allegedly laying out for them. She called Carla on the disposables, not trusting her own eyewear or judgment.
“I’ve just been circling. Should I continue this? I was thinking about street connects, and I remembered there’d been an article in one of the street papers about undocumented refugee girls. Maybe if I could locate the author, see if I could work this from that direction …”
“That sounds like a lead.” Terri squinched her eyes in frustration, her only confidant an emotional automaton. Hanging up, she figured out who Carla reminded her of: the veterinarian. The afternoon her dog, Congo, had died, Terri had found him on his side. She’d called the vet, an eccentric, frizzy-haired German lady who refused to address the humans in her office, speaking only in a strange falsetto directly to the animals. But when Terry had the vet look over Congo remotely, the woman had done so with an efficient thoroughness, then looked straight at Terri and said, “I’m so sorry.” There was something similar in Carla’s expression, a familiar remoteness.
In reality, her street connects were rusty. She stopped at a downtown newsstand, buying every English-language paper for less than the cost of a cup of coffee. There were only five now: Voice of The Towers, Figueroa Free Press, The Downtown Express, The Downtown Sun, and the stripped-down revamp of The Times Of India that had failed and rebooted a half-dozen times. In the car, she spread these out on the seats, each printed on the coarsest pulp paper, with bright graphics whose ink stained the reader’s hands.
In refugee newspapers, an almost antiquated politeness pervaded. The ones that thrived often sold their entire front page, and even the name of the paper for a day. Despite the almost comical reliance on advertising, each paper served several vital community functions, including classified ads and sports news. One of the leading refugee newspapers had hit upon a successful innovation: daily themes, cycled throughout the week. Tuesdays were cricket, Thursdays were soccer, Fridays were all about obituaries. Other, smaller dailies had followed suit.
Not that she’d read any without a solid investigative reason. Their national and international stories were pulled from wire sources, if not badly rewritten press releases.
There were no stories about gang life, and almost never any mentions of the war, the two plagues of refugee life omitted as cleanly as any act of censorship on the Overlay. What few stories did concern refugees were often written by citizen stringers, hard luck men like Nuestro Quintiglio. English-language Indian newspapers thrived among a population with no means of networked news and a waning literacy.
Terri didn’t know why she felt so superior. She’d given away her own meager collection of beach paperbacks after the divorce. And if she counted the two daunting shelves of palm tree books at the Zendejas house, Zack owned several dozen times the volumes she’d probably read in her lifetime.
The layout from the FFP looked about right. She remembered that some higher up had bought multiple copies and taped the article up in every workstati
on downtown. She’d tapped a finger on one paragraph as she’d read it, her finger coming away with a cheap bluish ink, as it did now. She called the listed number, surprised that this wasn’t audio only, accepting the check box, and finding herself in a simulation of their cluttered office. An elderly Indian man with a fantastic waxed mustache answered.
“I’m a homicide detective with the LAPD,”—she listed her badge number—“Your paper ran an article on unregistered female refugees. A few years back. I need to contact the writer.”
“We have no archives,” the man explained in a regal, thickly accented voice. “Except what you see …” He motioned toward a bank of brown metal filing cabinets at the back of the room. “If you can wait, I’ll gladly search.”
“That would be wonderful, thanks.”
The call went on hold, Terri wondering what possible reason a newspaper might have for not having macros, trackers, at least an internal, instantly searchable system, how even a refugee business could operate like this, one foot in the Middle Ages.
She looked back down to the papers, wondering if their simplicity in any way reflected the refugee experience. The compromises and omissions of immigrant papers were transparent; every online news source involved daunting layers of opaque complexity, of meaningless razzle-dazzle to hold public opinion. “Participation” had become such a byword of modern media that she’d almost forgotten what it had been like to just receive. Watching the news now meant negotiating endless offers to share and connect with other viewers. Personalization was crucial to individual identity, people basing their public persona, in part, around their news choices, the way they themselves reacted to and remixed the stories of the day. Some news outlets went so far as to allow their audience to vote entire subjects out of coverage.
Terri’s generation wanted curated news. The postwar generation wanted enthralling news. As best she could tell, friendships dictated the information people received from the outside, objective world. Young people only trusted stories recommended to them from their friends. It took work for Terri to get updates on the situation in Turkey, a place she would surely never visit herself. It made her feel like she was the one seeking out news from the fantasy world.
The man returned. “I’ll have to call you back.”
Inertia was the enemy. She’d need to set out on foot, to find something to jog her mind, to spur her on. Terri was back to where she’d started on the force, doing footwork, labor both honest and futile. Back on the pavement, she faced a faded mural of long-dead Mexican soccer stars, the paint having peeled from the eyes, hanging down in hard-to-look-at flaps, too pathetic to vandalize. Above this, an ancient, sun-worn sign read VIDEO TAPING IN PROGRESS.
She walked behind one young guy eating a burnt elote, corn glistening with chutney and chili powder, nodding his head to an unheard beat, probably soundtracking his entire life. She’d once heard of a sicko who just walked around all day listening to applause. As much as she liked to poke fun at personalized scoring, Terri always acknowledged that it had an important function in certain moments. She thought of the Zeppelin song in Leimert Park. The kid suddenly looked up, seeing something private, and she flashed back on the witness kid with his death butterfly.
Walking, each block formed a mini-district. On Broadway to Seventh, it was competing street dentists, each flaunting public health laws; kiosks for eyebrow threading and foot massage; a barber who’d set up shop on the sidewalk, complete with chair, mirror, and nearby standpipe done up in red and blue crepe paper. One block up, she passed a red-and-green nopalito booth; three different mango-on-a-stick huts; tiny, movable chai houses establishing themselves in all sorts of improbable nooks and just as easily evaporating.
Terri had never noticed how thoroughly the sidewalks had been dotted with black gum spots. It was history as stain. She thought of the yard out behind her grandmother’s house in Jersey, pavement under a sprawling oak tree that wept sap every summer, stepping on the sticky black dots in her bare-foot, running around collecting leaves and debris with her sticky soles. In hindsight, it was kind of gross. Fifteen feet away now, a barefoot child stood with eyes wide, receiving some sort of admonition in rapid-fire Hinglish. From this angle, she could see the corner of a storefront church, its vinyl banner advertising a blessing of the animals.
After the war, her quietly devout mother had stopped going to church entirely. Terri had thought it was something her mom had needed to process on her own, but then one day, maybe a few months later, she’d passed the boarded-up church. There’d been more church closings in the months to come, a mass boycott of a God who could allow such carnage. Later, in hindsight, Terri had been deeply grateful for the mass loss of faith. Not because she herself had any strong feelings in any direction—she’d retained her vaguely Episcopalian self-identification in the face of Gabby’s stubborn atheism—but because it almost definitely forestalled the kind of mass revivals that’d swept the Deep South and Russia. Immediately after the war, scapegoating had almost entirely followed political lines, meaning ethnic lines. But as ugly as that had gotten, it had at least followed a rational playbook. Not so elsewhere in the world.
The war had loosed so many self-supporting, self-replicating errors of thought. There was a persistent rumor that, somewhere deep in the bowels of Nano Alley, someone was putting the final touches on a radiation eraser, and that eventually, soon, Indians could return to their homeland and rebuild. She’d heard Indian political analysts praise the war as an instant reset on all the stifling dysfunctional inefficiencies of the Indian state. It was as if the war had been merely a natural disaster.
The world seemed destined, doomed, to repeat India and China’s mistake. Turkish rebels were still threatening to nuke Istanbul, to kill themselves if they couldn’t have their country. Years ago, there’d been a tremendous push to abolish the world’s remaining atomic arsenals. But those days were long gone, everyone trying to scramble by, the next generation too submerged in their own endless artificial worlds.
On the sidewalk, someone had written RECOGNIZE in strong chalk letters. For economic reasons, there was incredible pressure for the United States government to recognize the government in exile of India. Hundreds of billions of dollars in Indian money sat in offshore accounts held by nationals who had seen the writing on the wall. The key to unlocking that money, to spurring investment in Los Angeles and the revitalization so desperately needed after the Slide began, was in this simple act of recognition. Which would, of course, necessitate recognizing China in exile and, subsequently, the trillions of dollars in Chinese debt that had evaporated nearly overnight.
The entire refugee experience seemed summed in that one word—RECOGNIZE—all the self-reliance pitted against all the indolent apathy, no one making the first move, everyone waiting for recognition. When she intersected with the refugee world, it took a conscious switch for her to remember that it wasn’t a culture without networks, but rather one with its own networks: rumor, vigilance, memory; everything but oral history, the next generation having come up as removed from their parents as if they were cavemen or space lizards.
She didn’t totally blame these kids. They were pressed on all sides. Even two decades into the Slide, there were always fresh tales of parents who refused to obey local child labor laws, who had themselves toiled in mines or sweatshops and expected no less from their offspring. She’d once arrested a mother who’d migrated from an area in Meghalaya that had been strip mined to moonscape even before the war. The woman had worked her two youngest sons to death and sold all her hair for money; she seemed entirely unfazed by the universe.
Terri had never been sure how much of this self-reliance was imported and how much was thrust upon the refugees by circumstances. Or genetics, as Zack once asked, straight faced, of a skeletal little man attempting to carry a broken motor scooter on his shoulders. The thought of Zack pained her, made her alert.
The newspaper man called her back and she paused on the sidewalk outside Clifton’
s Cafeteria.
“You are very patient,” he said, curling his W, sounding winded from digging through folders. “I did find the article you mentioned. The author’s name was Nuestro Quintiglio. I’m going to need to spell that for you. That’s Q-U-I-N …”
Someone had reheated taquitos in the corner kitchenette of the Fourth Street workstation, a nasty smell, sharp and vaguely chemical. She found a chair in the farthest corner of the L-shaped room, not so much sitting as simply allowing her body to fall into it. Something about prolonged street work always exhausted her in a way that no amount of jogging could equal. Running: the thought seemed like an ancient memory, something she’d done when she’d been very young.
This corner of the room held two rows of tan cloth seats. Across from her and one row away, Travis Contreras sat brooding. Travis was a housing cop whose own life had soured through divorce. She’d heard he’d taken to crashing random parties whenever he had the opportunity, wandering the rooms of strange houses, knowing he’d be identified as police and thus immune from confrontation. She’d also heard he’d made a point of finding at least one book in each house and ripping out the last page, some random but highly focused act of aggression at the world. She’d seen him just last week, at Uganda, but he’d looked completely miserable and not open to any acknowledgement of their mutual existence, let alone their mutual predicament.
She opened up her notes, fanning them out into the air and aligning them with the plane of her lap. Even as she made the gesture, she knew it was nothing more than a ritual, like taking off and tossing her shoes at home. She closed her eyes, holding her head in her hands. She thought of all those people living in the feudal corners of civilization, unable to view their own lives as anything but static, knowing nothing of the past, having no framework for conceptualizing the future. And yet here she was, knowing no more about the location of one anonymous stranger than a cop would have a thousand years ago. Her phone rang. It was Blanco. On instinct, she clicked to reply before she could think through what she was doing.
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