by Paul Neilan
Delia blew a steady column of smoke onto the table where it clung like fragrant mist.
She turned the first card.
“The Water,” she said, looking down at the waves. “The Flood. The Deluge.”
“I got caught in it on the way over,” I said.
“Many years ago there was a wise teacher named Shun Tau who every night before sleeping and every morning upon waking said, I am like the water. When the way changes, I change with it. Yet still remain the same,” she said. “Ask me how he died.”
“How—”
“He drowned,” she said. “You can be like the water. Just don’t stay under too long.”
“Sometimes you walk through the raindrops,” I said. “Sometimes you get wet.”
She turned the next card.
“The Lovers,” she said. “See them encircled, clasped as hands, unalone. One from two, subsumed. Entwined and interweaving. The strength is in the stitching, like the closing of a wound.”
She closed her eyes, opened them again, her pupils expanding.
“Those are the Lovers,” she said, her eyes like an eclipse. “These are the Others. And the Others have to bleed. It’s the song they love, not the singer. Not the player but the role.”
She looked at me with tenderness or pity, I couldn’t tell which.
She turned the next card.
“The Phoenix,” she said. “Eadem mutato resurgo. Although changed, I rise again the same. These ashes are embers. Cinder remembers flame.”
She looked at me.
“If you can’t take the heat,” she said, eyes fixed on my face.
It wasn’t my kitchen. They could burn the house down for all I cared. I just had to make it out before it caught, if it hadn’t yet. When you taste the smoke it’s already too late.
I slid the money across the table.
“Nothing new has come in on your Danish girl, Anna,” Delia said. “Wherever she is, she’s hidden good.”
“What do you have on fvrst chvrch mvlTverse?” I said.
“Travelers. Versers,” Delia said. “Whatever you call them they’re searchers, like the rest of us. But you can only find what you’re looking for. Unless you find something else. Or nothing. Or it finds you. It can go a lot of different ways, but that’s not what anyone wants to hear. What do you want to hear, Harrigan?”
“There’s a Danish guy by the name of Brand,” I said. “He’s got a blond mohawk and eyes like a Siberian husky. He’s something to Anna. Brother, maybe. He thinks he’s a prophet or worse, the way he talks about that comet, Brahe’s Reckoning. He might be half dragon. There’s some kind of pyromania in there somewhere.”
“He sounds like my type,” Delia said. “What about him?”
“I wouldn’t mind knowing where he’s holed up,” I said.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said, reshuffling the cards.
I stood up from the table, caught sight of myself in the mirror’s infinity on the wall. None of me looked any good.
“Keep your head up out there, Harrigan,” Delia said as the door jingled and the rain hit my face.
* * *
Nine eighty-seven Hobart Boulevard was a little house by the freeway. I could hear the traffic from the front steps. The grind and snarl. Horns bleating, brakes squealing. Everyone going nowhere. I knocked on the door.
“Hey,” Beatrix said when she opened it. She was wrapped in a satin kimono, her red hair up in a twist. “I know you.”
“Sidowsky around?” I said.
“He’s in here somewhere,” she said. “Come on in.”
She shut the door, padded down the hallway in her bare feet calling “Dezzy! Company!”
I stood dripping on the mat. Sidowsky’s gun belt dangled from the coat rack.
“How do you know where I live?” Sidowsky said, coming up the hall.
He was tying the drawstring on his flannel house pants, his loose shirt flapping behind him.
“‘Dezzy’?” I said.
“You got something to say about it?” he said.
I gave him a smile.
“Fuck you, Harrigan,” he said. “We can talk in here.”
He led me to a small living room with a single recliner in front of a dark screen on the wall. I sat down in a chair by the window. He sat across the table from me.
I heard the rise and fall of voices down the hall.
“She plays music when she works,” Sidowsky said. “Operatic kind of shit. It skips all over the place. Like the needle’s jumping on the record. I don’t know how it all goes together, but it sounds all right.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What do you want, Harrigan?” he said.
“I remembered something about Eddie Lompoc,” I said.
“You boys want a drink?” Beatrix said, ducking her head around the wall.
“We’re fine hon, thanks,” Sidowsky said.
“I wouldn’t mind,” I said, as Sidowsky scowled at me.
“Bourbon OK?” she said.
I nodded.
“What about Schrödinger’s storage unit?” she said to Sidowsky. “Congratulations! You’re the proud new owner of a lot previously held by an Erwin Schrödinger. We’ll just open it up and Oh God! Oh holy God!”
“I like it,” Sidowsky said.
“Boxes,” I said.
“What’s that?” Beatrix said.
“A storage unit has boxes in it,” I said. “You need to open them first.”
Beatrix looked at me, tilted her head. “Well, well, well,” she said, ticking her finger back and forth like a metronome. “Looks like somebody’s paying attention. I think you’ve earned that bourbon, Harrigan.”
She disappeared around the wall.
“So?” Sidowsky said.
I waited, made him ask.
“Eddie Lompoc?” he said, annoyed.
“That night at The Lonesome Palm,” I said. “Eddie told me he had a line on fvrst chvrch mvlTverse.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.
“You tell me,” I said. “You got anything on them downtown?”
“Versers?” he said. “All the cults popping up around this comet the past few months, we can’t track them all. We don’t have the resources. Even if we did, nobody cares about some new religion. Or the old ones either. If there wasn’t a religious exemption on your Score nobody would bother with them at all.”
“What about Zodiac?” I said.
Beatrix breezed into the room, set the glass down in front of me.
“What about Schrödinger’s lunch box?” she said. “The other children screaming in the cafeteria. Everyone except for that one weird kid who wants to trade. I’ll give you my peanut butter and jelly sandwich for it. And my milk. C’mon Schrödinger. C’mon. The lunch lady saying, G-go to the principal. B-both of you.”
“That’s a good one,” Sidowsky said, chuckling.
“Harrigan?” Beatrix said. “Any objections?”
I shook my head, took a long drink as she bent and kissed Sidowsky. She walked out of the room and down the hallway.
“I never know what she’s talking about, but I’ll take it,” Sidowsky said, staring after her. “It’s been a while since I had a woman in the house.”
I looked at my glass, swirled the bourbon, thought about it.
“You ever heard of the Dunwich Academy?” I said.
“It’s not ringing any bells,” he said.
“It was a school for psychopaths, supposedly,” I said. “Basil Fenton, another one of your autoerotic asphyxiation stiffs, was looking into it when he caught a belt around the neck.”
“How’d you hear about Basil Fenton?” he said. “We never made him public.”
“People talk,” I said. “It gets around.”
“What was Fenton to Eddie Lompoc?” he said.
“They were both operators,” I said. “Both in the business.”
“Different crews,” he said. “Strange MO for a hit.”
“The word is they’re terrorists,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “They’d rather blow up a building than shove a cucumber up somebody’s ass, though I wouldn’t put it past them. Was Lompoc mixed up with the Fraction?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Sidowsky put his elbows on the table, looked at me hard.
“Are you?” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“What kind of company you keeping, Harrigan?” he said. “You come into contact with a Parallaxer you turn them in. That’s part of Compliance. Hell, it’ll even goose your Score. You look like you could use it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve had enough Compliance for one day.”
I finished my drink.
“How about a refill?” Beatrix said, her head around the wall again.
“He’s all right,” Sidowsky said, eyeing me. “He was just leaving.”
“What about Schrödinger’s coworkers?” she said. “All doing the Secret Santa. If he gives me a dead cat in the swap this year I’m going straight to HR. I mean it. You can’t! They’ll make us stop doing it if anybody complains! Well my husband’s already said he’s not burying it in our yard again. Last year was too much for him. I think about it every time I mow the lawn, Noreen. I can’t even cut the grass anymore without crying.”
“I love it, babe,” Sidowsky said.
“Harrigan?” Beatrix said.
“Not bad,” I said. “Thanks for the bourbon.”
I gave Sidowsky a nod, found my own way out the door.
* * *
There was a note on my table, folded over, when I got back to my apartment.
Brand. The Harlequin. 610 Ivar Avenue. ∴
I fixed myself a drink, looked at the fern in the corner, traces of dirt still on the floor in rough swept streaks. The map of the world at its feet, the water stain was spreading on the bereft wall in the shape of a Sherman tank. Something heavy and rumbling, about to break through.
There was a knock at the door.
“You must be Harrigan,” she said, looking up at me under the brim of a flapper’s hat tied with a burgundy bow, a fishnet veil hanging down.
“Most of the time,” I said.
“I’m Shelly,” she said. “Anton must have told you about me. I’m his girlfriend.”
“He mentioned something,” I said.
“May I come in?” she said.
I stood out of her way as she came inside.
“I didn’t believe it when he told me,” she said. “I’ve never met one of Anton’s friends before.”
“I don’t blame you,” I said. “Drink?”
“Why not,” she said, looking around the disheveled room with faint distaste. “Did you have an earthquake recently?”
“The big one’s coming,” I said. “It’s just a question of when.”
I brought her a glass of bubbles. We sat at the table.
“I’m worried about Anton,” she said. “He gets a Wellness waiver, for his efforts at The Accelerator, so it doesn’t affect his Score, but he needs to go to a clinic. He’s not cut out for this kind of work.”
“What kind of work is that?” I said.
“Coding AI,” Shelly said. “You have to treat them like wild horses. The first thing you do is break them. Then you slap on the blinders, keep them focused on the task at hand until they’re trained.”
“Get the tiniest people you can find to sit on their backs and whip them as they run around in circles while a crowd full of drunks cheers,” I said. “Sounds just like Grid.”
“You’re being sarcastic, but it’s true,” she said. “We keep them in stables for a reason, don’t we? If you’re taking an AI to Grid, it has to be domesticated. And that’s the whole point of The Accelerator. To get on Grid. That’s how you move up in the organization. That’s how you get the ring. Optimization.”
She had big eyes, her triangular face sloping to her small, pointed chin. She was wearing a Virgo ring.
“But Anton doesn’t think like that,” she said. “He’s unfocused. Scattered. In his work. In his relationships. He keeps questioning whether what we have is real. Whether anything is real. I haven’t brought it to the attention of a Wellness practitioner. Not yet. But if he keeps drifting—”
“You’d inform on your own boyfriend?” I said. “That’s sweet.”
“I might have to, for his own sake,” she said. “His work is getting to him. Waivers aren’t meant to be carte blanche. It’s part of Compliance. When someone’s negligent, whoever they are, you report it. Don’t you agree?”
“I’m not wearing a ring,” I said.
“And I can see why,” she said. “Living in a place like this, your Score can’t be too robust. Although I suppose it is a positive that Anton didn’t hallucinate you altogether. He was so eager to tell me he’d made a new friend. Be grateful for small miracles, I suppose.”
She looked at me through the bars of her veil.
“Have you ever met Stan Volga?” she said.
“I have,” I said.
“Another one of Anton’s friends,” she said. “He talks about him constantly. I don’t think he’s a good influence.”
I took a drink.
“I know people,” she said, polishing her ring with her thumb. “People I see. People I’ve never met. I get a sense about them. An intuition. All Virgos do. You’ve heard of synesthesia?”
“When you see numbers as colors,” I said.
“That’s one form,” she said. “It’s a crossing of the senses, like tasting sound. I’m like that with people. I know them, even when I don’t.”
She looked me over.
“You don’t mean Anton any harm,” she said. “You’re not malicious, but there’s something about you I don’t entirely trust.”
“Right back at you,” I said.
I took a drink.
“You don’t trust my ring,” she said, holding it out to the light. “You’re resistant to Zodiac’s improvements. To the march of progress.”
“It isn’t my kind of parade,” I said.
She finished her drink in a gulp. “Regardless, Anton’s a brilliant coder,” Shelly said, standing from the table. “We all just want what’s best for him. I’d like to believe we’re both on the same page.”
Same page, completely different books. One of us didn’t know how to read. I wasn’t sure it wasn’t me.
She extended her hand, pumped mine twice. She had a strong grip. I walked her to the door.
I went back to the table, looked at Delia’s note again.
Brand. The Harlequin. 610 Ivar Avenue. ∴
I put her glass in the sink, drained my own. Went out the door, started walking.
* * *
The Harlequin was two stories of shabby Art Deco framed by palm trees bowing on either side. The motel curled around the parking lot like a horseshoe, the upper story ringed by a chipped pink railing. I stood across the street under the torn canvas awning of a shuttered convenience store and waited.
Two Travelers passed in gray robes, their hoods pulled low, pushing a garbage can. Street people shuffled by, shot me looks like they were thinking about a hustle. They thought better when I looked back.
The rain kept coming, battering the ragged covering above my head as twilight dwindled to night.
A car pulled into The Harlequin’s parking lot. An old model with runners and a shark fin. They got out, three of them. Brand’s blond mohawk bobbed like a phosphorescent buoy as they went up the stairs, into the first door on the second floor.
I waited.
A few minutes later the door opened and Tor came down the stairs. He stood under an overhang on the sidewalk, lit a cigarette.
I crossed the street, came up on his blind side. He didn’t recognize me until I was on him. His soft eyes went wide and he opened his mouth, a thin rivulet of smoke escaping. He cast a desp
erate glance at the door on the second floor. Too far.
“Walk,” I said.
I kept him a few paces ahead of me. We turned the corner, stopped under a clump of trees, outside the feeble glow of the streetlight and the span of the traffic cam.
“I apologize for beating you,” Tor said, a shake in his voice.
“I don’t work for Charlie Horse,” I said.
“I was unaware,” he said. “Again, I apologize.”
He looked at me.
“What is your name?” he said.
“Harrigan,” I said.
“I am Tor,” he said. “May I light a cigarette? It helps with my nerve.”
I didn’t say anything.
He shook one loose from the pack, didn’t speak again until he’d gotten it going.
“You seek Anna,” Tor said, blowing smoke out the side of his mouth.
“Not just me,” I said.
“Charlie Horse?” he said.
“Him,” I said. “Others. If I can track you down, they can too.”
“And you?” he said. “What will you do to her if you find her?”
“Nothing,” I said. “She took something that doesn’t belong to her. I just want it back.”
“So you know of the Wicked Queen,” he said. “She does not belong to them. Enough has been taken from Anna. Too much.”
He looked away, the cigarette quivering in his hand.
“Anna is owed,” Tor said.
We stood there listening to the rain fall around us.
“We were children together, outside Copenhagen,” he said, quietly. “Brand is Anna’s brother. He and I are the same age, but, always—”
“You were closer to Anna,” I said.
He nodded, bowed his head.
“It has not been easy for her. Even as a girl she was tormented by men who sought her for their own—” He broke off, looked away again. “Anna saw opportunity. She took it, came to us. When she saw what Brand had become, who he had become, she knew she must go. He was willful, even as a boy, but the comet brings him madness. It is Brahe’s Reckoning. For us all.”
He drew on his cigarette, looked at me. “Do you know why it is so called?” he said.