Exploded View

by Sam McPheeters

  She woke exhausted in Carla’s storage closet, unable to sleep more than a few hours, feeling just as shaky and stiff as she had when she’d lain down. Sunlight spilled in from a thick window of reinforced security glass, making a long rectangle on the wall above her, next to the tall shelves of boxed supplies. She thought about how nice it would feel to jog. Reaching for the jacket she’d folded under her head, she fished out the last two breath mints, taking these without chewing, just letting them sit in her mouth.

  Lying on her back, staring up at the orderly row of boxes, she thought of The Shining, Jack Nicholson coming to in a locked pantry. As a teenager, she’d watched a documentary on the making of this movie. A narrator had discussed all the hidden messages and impossible geography allegedly masterminded by the director. She hadn’t gotten around to actually watching the film itself until years later. By then, the art form dissected in the documentary—a story, singular in presentation, masterminded by one person—had ceased to exist. Now everyone was a director, an artistic mastermind. As soon as copyright law permitted—ten years? Five?—there would be a million versions of The Shining, each with different endings, new characters, every viewer free to add or subtract to the geography of the hotel as they pleased.

  She’d seen a photography exhibit, not long after she’d moved out west, called “Our Common Humanity.” The show had focused on the impoverished undersides of every continent, featuring a variety of portraits and slumscapes, each with the huddled masses of the third world staring directly at the audience, matching the camera’s gaze with faces leeched of humor or hope. Terri had been haunted by the huge, luminous photos, the entire exhibition composed entirely of prewar pictures, so that all its defiant pain was already anachronistic, a peek backward.

  None of those pictures would mean anything to the new generation. Or, more precisely, pictures themselves would mean something entirely different and lesser to the new generation. Photography was no longer about documentation. It couldn’t be. Such a show now, less than twenty years later, would be about the show itself, everyone reading artistic intent into each photo, common sense holding photography closer to simulacra than actual representation. Bit by bit, picture by picture, memory by memory, no one could be sure that the past was actually the past.

  The endlessness of the networks—the infinity of rooms, plains, hidden pay-per-view civilizations—all of it was slopping over into the physical world, obliterating the rivulets and riverbeds that once defined the one, true past. It wasn’t just that the younger generation was bored by the content or format of history; it was that they no longer had any incentive to believe history.

  Revisionism had taken root with a supernatural ferocity. People remixed the past like they remixed old home movies. Some people remixed the war, changing battles or outcomes. Terri hadn’t kept up on the recent surge in war denial simply because the subject freaked her out too much. But she couldn’t deny that such denial was growing in popularity. Every year, she encountered more and more oddballs and cranks who insisted that there had been no war between China and India. Soon, there would be people insisting there never had been an India or China, period.

  A door slammed in the next room and a surge of panic shoved her upright, making her scramble for the gun somewhere under one of the flimsy blankets. Carla had let her in last night through one of the emergency exits, and even though she hadn’t formally passed through the main entrance, the building, and thus the force, would surely know she was on the premises. Logic gave police property a bit more safety than anywhere else, but she didn’t like not knowing how large or small that margin of safety might actually be. And when she realized she’d be sleeping in an unlocked storage room, it’d been a trick to dismiss that this was basically a cul-de-sac.

  A shuffle of motion came through the door, somebody moving around stacks of things on the worktable. Knuckles rapped. Terri sat perfectly still.

  “Hey,” Carla said. “Breakfast. C’mon. It’s almost ten.”

  She cleared her throat and said, “Yeah,” absurdly grateful for the spike of fear, more effective than any alarm clock for removing all need for coffee.

  But when she opened the door and smelled the roast beans, an equally old impulse kicked in, reminding her that fresh coffee was a privilege, that to refuse its sacrament was disrespectful. She poured herself a cup and, seeing no room on the cluttered sofa, perched herself on the edge of two stacked and solid-looking bankers’ boxes in the corner farthest from the entrance.

  Carla stood in the opposite corner and looked over her shoulder as she fiddled with a separate pile of boxes, saying, “There’s bagels,” motioning with her head toward a blue jute bag on the work table.

  “Great, thanks.” She drank down half the cup, feeling that acidic heat as a rejuvenation. “Any news?”

  “Nothing in the last twelve hours. Dead ends all around. Here’s some creamers for your coffee.”

  Terri was about to say she took hers black, but when Carla pressed the little sachets in her palm, she felt something extra, seeing a small note folded into something dense and serious. She unwrapped this and read,

  Did you set your VT to say that you had the flu? Cough once if Yes, tell me you need some sugars if No.

  She cleared her throat quietly, hoping that wouldn’t be mistaken for a cough.

  “Hey, did you happen to get any sugars?”

  “Yeah,” Carla said, sounding distracted. She crossed the room and pressed another few little water-soluble packets into Terri’s palm. On another note, she read,

  Something screwy is going on. Get out of here, use only disposables, call me in 30 mins. I’ll be on SwiftWhisper, off premises.

  She crumpled the note, slipping it into her pocket as she downed another mouthful of coffee, thinking she’d been looking forward to that bagel.

  “Hey, I was supposed to meet a contact a half hour ago. Let’s talk later. Thanks again for the coffee.”

  “Any time,” Carla said as the door swung closed.

  Outside, she summoned a private car through her civilian shades, parking three blocks away and finding SwiftWhisper. It was a messenger service she didn’t really understand, something probably for teens and adults with illicit intentions. Paying the hundred-dollar signup fee, she wondered if she should keep a receipt, picturing all the expenses from this bizarre, terrifying chapter of her life tallied and itemized on next year’s 1040 form. Next to her, a refrigerated minivan pulled up, dipping on its suspension as a delivery boy bounded out the other side and into a meat shop, the vehicle’s back end dribbling blood and water onto the pavement.

  SwiftWhisper wasn’t an audio account, so the two of them sat face to face twenty minutes later, Carla’s VT in the car with her.

  “I called you early this morning, to tell you I was going out for some food,” Carla said. “I was going to leave a message with your Dupe, for when you woke up, so you’d know when I was going to be back. Instead, your Dupe told me that you had the flu.”

  “That’s what I figured from your note. I didn’t do that, so … how is that possible?”

  “It isn’t. Unless you set it that way the last time you were sick and forgot about it?”

  “No.”

  “Look, Terri. Um. I can understand the stuff with someone breaking into your apartment—I mean, I don’t understand it, but I can kind of get my mind around some scenarios where it might be possible for someone to have set you up from on high. But this is something else. I mean, for someone to have forged your Duplicado …”

  “That seems like it would be a hard thing to do”

  “It’s not a hard thing to do. It can’t be done. Period. Your Dupe is the foyer to your personal, closed system. In a polycultural network chain, there is no means of outside attack.”

  “I don’t really follow …”

  “If you were using something on the Internet, sure, someone could, with a good amount of skill, attack you remotely. But that’s not possible on the Overlay. That’s t
he point of the Overlay. It’d be like someone coming into your house and changing the locks while you were watching them do it. And then you’re not even on a civilian system. I don’t know that any American cop network has ever been breached like this.”

  “Well, someone did get into my house …” she said, not sure why she was saying it.

  “For someone to change your outgoing, they would basically need your face, your eyes … they’d need to be you. Even if you had a twin sister … you don’t have an evil twin sister, right?”

  “I have a twin. Not identical.”

  “Jesus, no. That wasn’t even … that was rhetorical.”

  “Okay, yup.”

  “I don’t know what the hell is happening. Sorry, I don’t. I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know how to proceed, it’s fucked.”

  “I’ll call you back,” Terri said, shocked by Carla’s shock.

  She told the car to circle on the freeway, trying and failing to let this dread infect her, viewing the world through the eyes of a civilian. In the commercial layers, there were apps to fill the sky with anything and everything: aurora borealis, biblical locusts, confetti storms, flying saucers, moons, rainbows, zeppelins, lots of zeppelins, so many zeppelins they all crashed into each other and exploded. Some people went about their days with the watchful eye of God peering down from the Heavens. The public Layer two still had occasional fireworks in its sky. But she saw now that these fireworks were only barely discernable behind the mile-high advertising banners, accidentally making the explosions appear colossal, like something occurring far outside the earth’s atmosphere.

  On the month before her bus ride to California, rumors had run wild that a killer asteroid was on a direct collision course with the planet, and that the United States could no longer afford a space program capable of smashing the thing. She’d heard different versions of this story for a week, each slowly reassuring her, in their increasingly overblown shades of implausibility, that the earth would continue. One version held that the space program did have enough money, but that political gridlock had doomed humanity. Other versions said that the asteroid would destroy the moon, or graze the moon, sending it tumbling into the Pacific Ocean, or that a generation of presidents had known about the asteroid but had been too spineless to deal with it.

  She remembered those nights, trying to sleep while confronting the traces of this idea that the world may not continue. The rumor had surely thrived in the new era of postwar uncertainty. No one could pretend that God wouldn’t allow such a thing to happen, when He apparently had room in His grand design for all kinds of horror. After the rumors had subsided, she’d looked back on those nights as her low point. But things had continued. She’d come out the other side. Terri pulled up her call box with a fresh resolve. Carla materialized on the third ring.

  “Weren’t you saying earlier that you could do a custom trace on anything?”

  “Yeah. I mean, don’t hold me to anything, but yeah.”

  “Then do one for the gorilla.”

  “How so?”

  “Even in a county this size, there are still a finite amount of gorilla costumes, right?”

  Carla let out one dry little chuckle, “It doesn’t really work like that …”

  “No, but you could do a trace on a mask, right?”

  “Well. Huh. Yeah, I suppose.”

  “So maybe this shooter did us a favor. They came and went through the toilet tent, but they must’ve gotten the suit from somewhere. Maybe you can locate all the gorilla suits in Los Angeles in a set time period, narrow down the search, find some distinguishing characteristics off the footage of the city hall shooting. Worst case, it’ll be something mass-produced. But even that gives us one piece of information more than we have now.”

  “I’ll get back with you.” Carla vanished again.

  The car swung onto the 101 and Terri yawned uncontrollably, removing her shades and leaning against the vibrating glass with her eyes closed. Even with the road humming below, she wondered why it was so easy to fall asleep in a car when it wasn’t a sleeper. In the sync of traffic, cars matched up, locking into each other’s slipstreams, creating patterns of hums. Head bobbling, examining the light behind her eyes, she pictured Carla furiously flipping through boxes and boxes of information, searching the entire metropolis for a gorilla face, one eye ordering a million eyes to comb through streets and alleys and parks.

  She jolted upright, rubbing her lower lip in a fresh fear. After a careful weighing of her options, she and Carla had decided that her workstation was the safest place for Terri to sleep. Whatever outside mercenaries were involved, they couldn’t get into the building if they weren’t on the force. And Carla’s office was double locked. There was no way someone could get into the front room without being heard in the second room. It’d been an imperfect fix for an indefinable problem.

  She’d only stepped twenty feet to get into the waiting car, but she’d done those twenty feet in the wake of Carla’s cryptic note, preoccupied, with her face uncovered. Anyone using the Basement would have had a full-view shot. With some bad luck, she might have been picked up by a commercial face-spotting network as well. Dumb: there was a dust mask in her jacket pocket.

  A gangbanger had once told her that his biggest fear was getting locked in sync with a car holding rival gang members. It had resonated with her, but mostly in the Sucks To Be You category. Now she sat low, feeling his fear, just her eyes coming up over the jump seat upholstery, peeking out at the synced traffic behind her, the faces of strange, intent men peering back. They could be anyone. She resisted powering up her PanOpts and finding out.

  She ducked low again, sitting on the floor, feeling vulnerable, weak, stupid, and even stupider still for hiding in this position. In all the depths of dumbassery to which an average citizen could sink, one of the most common and absurd mistakes was the belief that car doors were impenetrable to bullets. She was a sitting duck on the freeway. But where wouldn’t she be? If she’d exposed her face, she’d need to arrange another car switch.

  Another thought came on the heels of this. What if Krista or Tammi called her line? Whatever faceless enemy was after Terri, would it pursue her sister or niece? She tried to extinguish this panic loop, finding she couldn’t. She moved the car’s floating control box over to rest on the floor next to her, instructed the car to pull out of sync, to pull off at the next exit, and as it dipped down onto surface streets, she instructed it to loop around, heading north, not sure if she really was being followed or not.

  Fifteen minutes later, parked under a tree on a side street, Terri tried to sit and concentrate, ignoring the car interior that blazed with wraparound ads for tire companies and bath salts. She needed reassurance that her messages couldn’t be plundered, instinctually knowing that she had already crossed over into territory where Carla wouldn’t be able to reassure her of anything. At the church across the street, a robot and vampire-themed Quinceañera was wrapping up, and she experienced a familiar disconnect, an anger at the inappropriateness of people going on with their lives, disrespectfully oblivious to the chaos of hers.

  A car passed and slowed, edging up and parking two spaces ahead. Carla appeared on the seat opposite her. Being on the floor, Terri instinctually felt like she was about to get chewed out.

  “Okay, I found him.”

  “Found who?”

  “The gorilla guy.”

  “Already?”

  “Hold on, I gotta …” She heard a fumbling in the audio as Carla’s VT stared out at the church steps and then abruptly vanished.

  “Okay. I got two sets of shades on.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re in audio, on my head, I got PanOpts in visual. Yeah, I found the gorilla guy. It looks like he’s dead too.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Uhm … name is … Clay Tejada, forty-eight, pretty clean family man, although I’m seeing some youthful wild oats stuff twenty-five years ago. Listen. This guy dresses u
p as a gorilla full time …”

  “A fetishist.”

  “It’s his job. He does gorilla-gram stuff. Balloon deliveries. Parties. I think he sings.”

  “That …” She whistled and gritted her jaw in exasperation. “How could somebody be that stupid? To do a shooting in plain view in their work outfit?”

  “Yeah, I thought about that. Whatever motivated this guy, it must have been a serious motivation. Serious enough to override all judgment.”

  “Scared stupid.”

  “That would be it. And if you think about it, that would cover all these killings. Froggy was the dumbest of the bunch. The rest of these people showed a general level of prudence in their daily lives, and yet three out of the five shootings went down in public. I think these people were scared shitless. Whoever it is that arranged for the gun to get passed from one person to the next … whoever this person is, I think they have a hell of a lot of leverage over each perp-slash-victim.”

  “Three out of five. So where’s gorilla guy now? Besides Heaven.”

  “He’s in a parked car in the valley, in a Radio Shack lot. The window was rolled down when he got shot. My guess is he was trying to clear his head after the City Hall shooting, to make sense of whatever mess he’d gotten himself into.”

  “I know the feeling,” she said, freshly nervous, glancing again to the car parked ahead of her, to the figures who seemed to be examining her through the glass of the intervening vehicle.

  “One more thought. This guy’s three days dead …”

  “That should smell good,” Terri said, realizing that if his suit had AC—as a full-body animal costume surely would—it might actually not be so bad.

  “The point I’m trying to make is that there’s not such a wide spread on the duration between shootings. Four days between Froggy and Farrukh, a day between Farrukh and Santos, but then three days between each following shooting. I think Santos is the glitch in the timeline because Quintiglio was a reporter and knew how to track down subjects quickly. Which means there’s a good chance that the person who shot Gorilla Guy is still walking.”