In Extremis

by John Shirley

  Feet up under her as she sits on the couch like it’s hers, Dragon Miss counts the money Ray and Buddy give her, lays out the fine cocaine on the glass-topped coffee table, the flaky chopped-fromrocks stuff that they only dream about on the street. Like a lady putting out the tea things, she sets up the little propane torch, the ether, the baking soda solution, the glass pipe for real freebasing, none of that piss-doorway rockhead bullshit. She puts on a CD of Mozart’s Requiem. Maybe for Charlie, though he’s still alive. Buddy and Ray would rather hear Crystal Castles, but there’s been a shift in polarity and Dragon Miss is in charge. Maybe I should mention that the houseboy carries a gun. That’s two guns now.

  I distract myself from the cocaine prep by looking over the window locks, strategically unlocking a few, shutting off the alarms, mentally totting up the fence value of some of the smaller antiques and the old English silver.

  We check on Charlie and his leg looks all swollen and weird-colored. It’s his right leg, maybe to do with the corkscrew wound, maybe it’s the circulation being cut off, maybe both. He’s feverish, squirming in his sweat and stink in the closet (Dragon Miss makes a come-out-ofthe-closet joke); he’s not quite all there, but he mutters some stuff I hear when I’m squatting by him, and some of it makes me sick and some of it makes me flash on ideas.

  I’m belting some Johnnie Walker and thinking about Louisa. One day she’sd putting a cold cloth on my head when I’m crashing from the cocaine binge, and she’s being really gentle about trying to tell me to go to rehab. Just so patient and gentle and I felt like, She’ll always be there.

  And a week later, she’s dead, extinguished from the world. Not there.

  I sip some more scotch and decide not to think about Louisa. Force it from my mind. Start tripping on how this Charlie’s dying and how I don’t feel much about it, and how the Japanese houseboy does feel something but it’s just fear, and how we’re standing around the closet making fun—the others are sucking on the pipe—and it’s like that Max Ernst painting of the demons chewing at St. Anthony, and now I’m one of the demons, and I don’t remember becoming one. I’m tripping on it, but all the time I’m thinking what I can score on all this.

  So then Dragon Miss’s friends show up and one of them has royally fucked up: Berenson, this big black guy, has brought a bunch of whores with him, two black, two white, one maybe Filipino, and some stoned-out white asshole he met in a sex club who’s got a lot of dope money on him. Berenson, funny thing is, gets actual money from the State of California to run a prostitutes’ rehabilitation center—and of course he just keeps the money because the guy’s a pimp. He lays into those bitches with a belt, too. They seem to like it.

  I never once hit Louisa.

  So all these animals are dancing in the living room, breaking the furniture, putting Charlie’s smaller stuff in their purses and going through his medicine cabinets and his liquor cabinets and his shoe rack, then checking out his suits, some pretty expensive suits to sell, and they keep coming back to suck on the glass pipes—there’s four pipes going now—and sometimes they go to the closet and they kind of fuck with Charlie. He’s every trick to them, I guess, and they’re getting theirs now. Everybody debates about the best way to drain Charlie’s bank account without pulling down too much attention. The air is in layers of smoke, it’s got its own ionospheres and tropospheres, and now somebody’s got the rap station on the home theater—so far Dragon Miss has kept them from taking the plasma TV out, which is just common sense—and the houseboy is looking really pale and nervous. One of the whores is working on Berenson’s dick, licking his balls, too, and Berenson’s willie is half erect and it’s going up, up, slowly, like it’s being slowly lifted on a crane, and another whore is on her knees in front of a chair with her head under her girlfriend’s skirt, and Ray is kind of listlessly fucking a long, skinny white girl with one pump on and the other skinny silver-toenail foot bare and her underwear around an ankle, they’re doing it on the rug in front of Charlie’s closet, Ray yelling at Charlie to look! look at this, Charlie, but Charlie can’t see outside his sick haze.

  The doorbell rings and some transsexual prostitutes who work for Dragon Miss come in, so shrill you can hear them over the rap and the laughter, like the high-pitched, whining noisemakers that cut through the bangs and drums of a Chinese New Year’s parade. They ooze into the room like they’re coming down the runway on the lipsync stage, invisible microphones in their hands, three of them in pounds of makeup competing for attention. The glass pipes get most of the attention. But these TV whores have got some ronnie with them, brown crystal heroin, and I manage to get a line of that. It puts my head in order so I’m thinking priorities again.

  Buddy is in the corner in a real nice chair, looking kind of shrunken in on himself, maybe crashing from cocaine and staring to see consequences in his mind’s eye, looking like he’s going to panic. I give him the bottle of Johnnie Walker.

  Then Ray brings out the head iron. “Y’all ever try this shit?”

  I trip on the head-iron thing. It’s got the heft of a small electric drill. It’s like electronic brain drilling, I’m thinking. I’m tempted, but it still scares me. The smell of the vaporized cocaine in the air is tugging at me, and I know I’ll never get to business if I get started with cocaine or head irons. I’m feeling rounded out and pleasantly heavy in the dick from the heroin and only a little nauseated. I wonder if Charlie’s dead.

  Buddy is trying to talk Ray into getting rid of the head iron, but it’s too late, the meth-tranny whores are already squealing around it, practically spinning on their spike heels to try it . . . the whole feel of the scene is changing around this head iron . . . it’s putting a weird off-buzz in the air that’s like one of those freak waves you hear about that smashes boats . . . The Dragon Miss frowns at the head iron.

  “I don’t trust those things, I’ve heard stories, they are not sympatico with working girls . . .” she says.

  But Ray has already done a head-iron hit and is reeling in waves of glory, and the paleness of his rage rises in him and he snarls something at her I can’t hear, something about fake fag-bitches, and Houseboy pulls his gun and Ray pulls his gun and Dragon Miss sees that and decides the polarity can shift for a while, and she pushes Houseboy’s gun down, tells him to put it away and signals one of the girls. The girl’s so fucked up she doesn’t even seem to see Ray’s gun and she starts playing with his dick, so he lowers the gun but doesn’t put it away.

  The head iron starts to get passed around to everybody. Dragon Miss looks more startled than ever . . .

  One of the queens is giggling on the phone. “You hear what Buddy and Ray did?” So now the thing’s leaking at the seams.

  I expect Dragon Miss is going to fuck Buddy or one of the younger guys here—I’m old enough to have damage from the New York Dolls—but she takes me by the hand and we go into the biggest bathroom, lock the door. The houseboy sees this and writhes with jealousy, you can see it in his face. So much for fucking Oriental inscrutability. He doesn’t do anything about it—me fucking his mistress right in the next room is more humiliation, which is what he’s paying her for, so it all works out.

  Till now. Dragon Miss’s been watching everybody else’s sex in a kind of preparation voyeurism. Now she’s ready and probably figures I’m the one most likely to get a hard-on that’ll stay, because I’ve been avoiding the C.

  Bathroom’s trashed because they’ve been in here going through it looking for drugs and anything salable. But we clear the junk from the floor and lay down some towels. She’s been on the pipe for about an hour, plus did a line or two of the ronnie, so she’s as wet as a pretend girl can get.

  We do some things with the shower, both kinds. Then we get down to some serious business. I turn her facedown—she gets tired of being a dom with her houseboy . . .

  She can’t ejaculate, since she only gets about two-thirds hard, but there’s another kind of orgasm and about the time my knees are getting sore she flaps aroun
d in it, like a baby seal getting its head knocked in.

  So I let go, and come, too.

  Coming, I feel something in me loosen up, and I think about Louisa the night before they found her.

  We were on the roof of her place, September evening, having a tar beach picnic, and I’m trying to zing the pigeons with pieces of a broken Mad Dog bottle somebody left, and she’s telling me I should call my brother. I feel like her face is prettier and more real in that second because of what she wants me to do; it makes me feel like she maybe really does give a shit, because she wants me to call Dougie and tell him it’s okay, that I forgive him for ripping me off, that’s what junkies do and I understand that . . .

  I can’t do that, but I feel, for a moment, like maybe some of us are going to be all right . . . “You got to be part of somebody or you nobody,” she says. “You not even real if you can’t feel.”

  It rhymes; she’s pleased with that. “Stop throwing shit at the pigeons,” she says.

  I kiss the back of her neck and cup her tits and she leans back against me . . .

  But now Dragon Miss tells me to wash my dick and go out into the living room with her, it sounds like they’re really going off out there, she’s got to see how Houseboy’s doing . . .

  After we go back out, the whole scene has changed again. The off-buzz saturates the place. The walls are screaming, there’s a kind of peak to the noise and tension, two or three arguments going at once, and they’re wrestling over the head iron. Two of them, no, shit, three of them now, actually fighting, hitting, scratching for the head iron.

  Looking around now, I start to get seriously scared, because I can see everyone’s been doing the head iron, even the houseboy. And now there’s three guns in view Berenson’s got his out, he’s yelling at Houseboy, and Houseboy’s skull’s showing through the skin of his face with all his straining to control himself, but I can see he’s going to lose it. The white asshole Berenson brought is out cold in the corner with his head in a puddle of blood. His wallet’s lying next to him like a gutted fish. Then I see a black whore in a skewed blond wig snag the head iron, because someone dropped it in the fight, and she’s got the closet open and she’s shoving the head iron against Charlie’s head more or less at random, laughing, randomly stimming what’s left of his brain, and he’s foaming at the mouth and shitting himself and actually breaking some of the ropes with a really goneoff rage and she’s laughing and slapping him with the iron, but she puts her hand too near his mouth and Charlie takes off three of her fingers, just as neat as a metal-shop tool, snipping them off with his teeth, and she screams and Berenson—nude, muscular but for that potbelly—Berenson, he sees what Charlie’s done and he points the gun and really shakes with relief as he lets go: shoots Charlie four or five times, and the houseboy gets mad because Berenson’s fucking with one of Dragon Miss’s assets and he starts shooting Berenson—

  Buddy and I make eye contact and we both slide fast into the bedroom. The two other people in the bedroom are out cold, no, wait, one of them is out cold and the other one is dead, looks like a heart attack—and I shout at Buddy over the noise from the next room, the shooting and screaming; and we tip over an antique armoire so it jams the door shut. Then we take care of our own business, but I hear the Dragon Miss stuck on the other side screaming for me to open the door, open it, or they’re going to—we don’t hear what they’re going to do, because then bullet holes punch through the door behind the armoire and her blood comes through; along with her blood comes her scent, her perfume, right through the door . . .

  It’s the head iron, the glory and the insane rage and misery that come when you use it; with that thing it’s like you get a lifetime of sin in one blast and then you go straight to Hell, do not pass go, all in one minute.

  And the head iron’s stirring that room up like blender blades, we can hear it, screaming and laughing and crying in there. Ray thumping on the door now, Buddy crying because he wants to help Ray; he tries to move the armoire, but I won’t let him, because they’ll all come in with Ray then, and anyway, I’ve already made the phone call to 911 because I was afraid the people in the other room would kill me. So since I’ve called 911 we got to get out fast.

  I have to drag Buddy out the window to the fire escape and up to the roof, and as we go we get a diagonal glimpse through the window of the living room: there’s Ray with Berenson and two whores, the three of them kicking Ray, who’s probably already dead, but they’re kicking him, kicking him, Berenson’s dick wagging with every kick.

  A little later we’re driving a stolen car, just about a block away, when the sirens start wailing. I have to laugh. Buddy starts crying again.

  What Charlie whispered when I almost felt something for him was what was in the false top of the armoire. It was a locked metal box. I guess Charlie was trying to make a deal . . .

  The dead guy in the bedroom had a BMW key chain and there were only two Beamers on the street.

  So next morning, really burned out, me and Buddy, we’re at a rest stop halfway to Las Vegas, standing behind the maroon BMW, its trunk gaping, using a tire iron on the box. Takes us twenty minutes more to finally get the metal box open.

  The box contains less than I hoped for but more than I expected. About thirty grand in cash total and about twelve in loose diamonds. What about safe-deposit boxes, Charlie? Probably had one. But he was one of those guys who liked to keep some close.

  Me and Buddy are doing okay. Cabo San Lucas has a full-on scene.

  I’m trying to feel those other things again. It helps to think about Louisa. You got to be part of somebody or you nobody. I was just so loaded that night. I can’t remember. I can’t remember. I try, for her, but I can’t remember:

  I don’t know if I was the one who killed her or not.

  SMARTBOMBER

  Corporal Lionel Billingsgate climbed up the concrete stairs, ran his ID palmer over the scanner, waited till the door opened and then strolled into the attack station on the top floor of NSA Building Seven, lower Manhattan. As was traditional here, he wore desert cammies, to show solidarity with the men actually fighting overseas, in Syria.

  There was almost no one in the remote-attack center. The surveillance team was at first mess, but he had second mess, at two, like most of the smartbombers, and he had two hours of missile guidance before then. He waved at a fellow Marine, Specialist Janice Wing—a pretty half Asian, half black girl he was hoping to maybe date if they got a furlough. She carried herself with real confidence, as she walked over to the Commander’s office; you could almost make out her taut little figure under her cammies. She wanted to go to a Broadway show—if the High Security Alert was reduced to orange, low enough to let the shows go on. There hadn’t been a serious suicide bombing in Manhattan for three weeks, so maybe they’d go.

  It felt good to climb into the dull-green, air-conditioned, bombpositioning cubie. Felt like climbing into an old, well-worn saddle, like back home on his parents’ ranch in Oregon. He wondered if Janice liked horses.

  There were eight positioning cubies in the windowless rectangular room, four on either side of the aisle, each screened from the others so there’d be no peripheral distractions.

  He waved at Bill Mercer, the black lieutenant out of Atlanta. Bill supervised runs on the southeastern-three sector of Aleppo. Drinking a cup of instant coffee at his little workstation, Mercer gave him the hand signal that meant his station was ready, and Lionel settled in to control posture.

  The computer was already booted up, the monitor was set to PREP. Lionel had to only put the headset on, and tap in a request for that day’s coordinates. He recognized the coordinates, when they popped up in the windows: a suburb of the target city. And that sent a chill through him. He didn’t like doing the suburbs. Too many civilians. But that was just one of the risks. This long-distance, remote method of attack saved lives in the long run.

  Lionel keyed in the coordinates, picked out a skybot launcher. Oneseventy-nine was green to go.
He sent in his request, spoke to the launch dispatcher, got the go and launched: with near-instantaneous satellite-transmission, piggy-backed through autonomous vehicles hovering over the area, he had caused a real missile to launch somewhere in Iraq, headed for Syria. He got a firm grip on the joystick, and waited: he had the controls programmed so the nose cam on the autonomously controlled missile didn’t come online until his projectile was within a minute of the target. He liked to get a tight focus, close to the target, so he could use his trained attention span to the fullest.

  It didn’t take long—the missile switched on where he’d programmed it to, and the monitor showed the ground racing by below. He was on his way to hit what the monitor identified as an artillery emplacement.

  Lionel clicked easily into the “smartbomber” mind-state he’d trained so long and hard for . . . And though his body was in Manhattan, in his mind he was flying over the desert. The missile was already guided by a laser fired from a surveillance drone over the target, but his fingers on the joystick made minute adjustments, transmitted from the station to the real missile—a Warspear III—which responded in .00009 seconds, near instantaneously, tightening to a flatter trajectory, honing in more precisely on the cross-hair mark. He could take it off target if he needed to.

  The crosshairs were superimposed on the ever-transforming horizon, which presently became the desert outskirts of town—the blasted wreckage of an oil refinery whipped by; a bomb-pocked highway unreeled below the missile’s nose cam. It was focused on the angle of approach to the target, but not yet the target itself . . .

  But the target was coming up now, according to the computer voice in his headset. “Estimated fifteen seconds to impact . . . nine seconds . . .”

  Lionel felt the familiar rush of power, of connection, as the missile he guided with his own hand flew to its target. His monitor showed housetops, low buildings, a bomb-wrecked mosque flashing by—and to Lionel it was as if he was the missile, as if he were flying over the desert. He always found himself straining forward in his seat, as if to ease the wind resistance, like a diving eagle with its wings folded back. Time seemed to slow. Three seconds seemed like fifteen, twenty seconds. A school flashed by below, an artillery emplacement, a store—