Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  As I take the elevator up, I know I’m taking a huge risk by even being here. I don’t know if anyone’s still watching Jerry’s place. For all I know, the superintendent or the Feds could be up there waiting for me, or worse, some assassin hired by Jerry’s father, who last I heard is still hanging in there at 130 years old. Still running his corn syrup empire. His heir apparent, Jerry’s older brother, has been hanging in there at senior VP for the last ninety years. Probably the longest wait in human history for the scepter to be passed down. When we live too long, our children have no choice but to become our enemies. This makes me laugh for some reason, and I need it, because if Jerry’s father is after me, it’s no joke. Corporations are like their own city-states, operating largely outside Federal jurisdiction. And Jerry’s dad is the emperor of his corporation. The murder of my own son stirred a rage in me that seethes to this day, so if Caldwell believes I killed his favorite child, I’m in real trouble. I take out the gun Sabrina left me, just in case.

  The elevator stops at the top floor. I take a breath and punch in the entry code I’ve known for decades. The code that Jerry trusted me with. And this feels funny, because it’s the first time I’ve ever come by unannounced. Throughout our entire friendship, I always gave her a heads-up out of respect. I wish I could do that now. I wouldn’t blame her father for wanting my head. When I find out who did her in, I’m gonna want their head, too.

  The elevator opens, and I step inside. It looks exactly the same as the last time I was here. Procedure. When you investigate a murder within The Money, you don’t mess their shit up while you look for evidence. You close the case quickly, or The Money will send every exorbitantly priced PI and lawyer in existence to breathe down your neck until you choke on your failure.

  I know the other reason nothing has been touched. As far as the chief was concerned, this case was closed. I murdered Jerry Caldwell. Fuck it. I put my gun on the bar and pour myself a drink. My prints are all over the goddamn place anyway. I take a sip and look around. Still black and rose gold, a place of antiquity. It’s funny—ever since the operation, I’m consciously trying to soak in the colors I could always see. The ones that were already in front of my face. When did I just stop looking at the things around me? I’ve gotta re-teach myself if I’m going to solve this. I eye the floor. Its shimmering pink-gold ocean surface that gives one the feeling that they’re walking on water.

  I take another sip and watch Jerry’s sculpture. Ascalon. I remember when Akira shot Ascalon into outer space. How unimpressive it looked packed up. Like a giant shipping container with stupid satellite ears. People got real scared the first time they saw the ray upon completion. It looked like Akira’s plan had been to deliver furniture to The Killing Rock. Even I laughed and a part of me thought, Oh boy, we’re fucked.

  But then she explained. A cosmic ray cannot be shot from the earth’s surface; it would be severely weakened by atmosphere. Ascalon was taking a six-month journey past Mars, near Saturn, where this giant metal can would unfold into a weapon that would unleash the aimed energy of an exploding star at Sessho-seki. The Killing Rock, she said, had no chance. People listened, but with a skeptical eye at the giant box, which didn’t look like it could fly over a puddle, much less to Saturn. What if doesn’t make the trip? some asked. What if it misses? asked others. What if it’s too close to us when it fires and destroys the entire solar system? Can’t we test it first? Honestly, that one popped into my mind more than once. Few doubted Akira until time was too short and they saw what cynics had begun calling The Spam Can and The Mystical Flying Lunch Pail.

  Akira lost her patience with this and refused to appear in public. Then people started speculating that she knew she’d failed and was hiding out of humiliation. Others thought the packed ray was shaped like a box because Akira’s master plan was to save herself and live in it as a condominium in the far reaches of space. The president did his best to reassure everyone, but no one trusted presidents anymore. The unimpressive man was just another in a long line of entertainers and influencers who had enough name recognition to get elected and were more than willing to tell people what they wanted to hear. Everyone knew politicians got their jobs because no one smart wanted them. Someone like Akira or Jerry should have been president, but the slick got recruited by corporations. So the president was almost impeached.

  And it occurred to me then that the people I’d silenced, I’d silenced just in time. If the dissenters had been around when the box was revealed, the entire Ascalon Project could have been ripped apart at the hands of billions who in an earlier lifetime couldn’t fathom that a large object hits the ground at the same time as a smaller one. That the earth is round, or that it isn’t the center of the universe. They never saw such a telescope in their goddamn lives. And I couldn’t blame them too much. Hell, looking at that box, I wasn’t too sure myself.

  But nobody remembers that version of Ascalon anymore. They remember the image playing in Jerry’s sculpture. The bright spear of a saint that slayed a flaming dragon. The one that cut across the sky. The people old enough to remember deny that they ever felt doubt. They claim to have been the level-headed ones who did a little hobby astrophysics studying to confirm Ascalon would work. Others claim they beat some sense into neighbors who didn’t have faith. Me, I remember the looting. The marching of soldiers through cities to squash mobs. The resurrection of every kind of church. The mass suicides. I remember watching all this with Akira. By this time, she and Jerry had had their falling out. It was just me and Akira at her telescope, a battalion of soldiers surrounding us. She didn’t appear nervous for a single moment.

  I step up to Jerry’s sculpture, lean down, and turn it off. When I stand back up and look around, I notice for the first time how damn distracting the piece is. Which makes sense, since it’s a series of iconic images, which people can’t take their eyes off.

  Now, with the holo sculpture off, I look around the room at the other works of art. Some I recognize, others I don’t. One, I’m pretty sure is an original Monet. A bridge with floating pink and purple lilies beneath it. But it’s the grass in the backdrop I’m looking at, seeing it for the first time. Another painting, a Dalí, the one with the melting clocks, has always seemed a little too forcefully symbolic to me. But now that I can see the red clock, it strikes me as more interesting. I remind myself to stop concentrating on the greens and reds. But it’s tough. I force myself to look at the pink and purple lilies, too, and the black ants infesting the orange clock and the monster almost seeming to take a nap in the middle of the painting. I look, but these aren’t the ones that interest me. The one I want to see is the one I’ve always looked at first. The only one I have ever dreamed about. It’s the one of the girl in the red sweater.

  I have always, always looked at this painting and hunted for green, never knowing why. But looking at it now without that hang-up, I’m just admiring the richness of the colors. The tree, its giant, brown twisted branches giving the impression that I’m not looking at one tree, but a hundred melding together. The children with their dated, dirty clothes. Focused on their brave expressions, I’ve never noticed that the kids who climbed the tree had to get dirty to get up there. I look at the children smiling in front of the twisted trunk and see a brightness in their skin that suggests the artist enhanced their vanity more than their fake smiles do. I see the girl in white off to the side, indecisive about which group to join. She wants to belong so badly but doesn’t know where.

  Then the girl in the red sweater. I still can’t see her face, but her sweater is such a striking red that I don’t see how the paint didn’t bleed through the canvas. Why her? Why always her? Maybe it’s because I can’t see her face.

  The next thing I know, I’m doing the unthinkable to what might be a priceless masterpiece. Like gods, these aren’t supposed to be touched, just worshipped. But I need to look closer. I need to see what the red sweater feels like, smells like. I smash the locked glass cas
e with my elbow and pause. Good. No alarm. Carefully, I remove the painting from the wall and flip it over, expecting to see a red stain behind it. What I see instead almost makes me drop the canvas.

  It is the exact same painting. But from the opposite point of view.

  Four of the children, the two in the tree, and the two smiling in front of it, are no longer visible. The giant banyan obscures them. The other girl, the indecisive one, now has her back turned to me. I can see from the dirt on her denim shorts that she, at some point, sat on the ground. This suggests that she got tired of standing there all day and sat down, but the artist asked her to get back up. There she was, forced to look at her classmates all day long, not knowing which group to choose. In fact, once the artist started the painting, she could never choose. She would be rendered alone forever.

  I see the pond now. Green, depicted in such detail that I even spot slivers of tadpoles under the water. I also see what looks like a tiny piece of bright candy at its muddy bottom. But these aren’t the things I’m supposed to be paying attention to. Clearly what the viewer is supposed to look at from this side is the face of the girl in the red sweater. So I do. I study her closely. The first thing is something anyone would notice, colorblind or not. A deep scar runs down her forehead to her right eye—straight, as if it were carved with a scalpel down the edge of a ruler. The scar leads to an eyeless socket, its lid held open with a small right hand without a pinky finger. The crater is black and endless, and I immediately feel horrified for this child. Who would do this to her? Of course she didn’t want to face the artist for the front side. Then why would she do so for the back? I tell myself to not get stuck on the missing eye and step back to look at everything. I rehang the painting with the new side facing out and take another step back.

  It’s a very recognizable face. Parts of it, I’ve seen thousands of times. She has Akira’s eyes and lips. Her ears are even pinned close to her head, just like Akira’s. Her hair isn’t black like her mother’s, but the brown of the tour guide’s. Her skin, a touch darker, and nose, more broad than pointy, are her father’s too.

  Then I see another thing I missed in front.

  The girl is holding a green bird in her left hand. Its drooped neck is clearly twisted. It’s dead.

  I look away and take a breath. I have no doubt. This is Akira Kimura’s daughter. Whether Ascalon is her or the one in the tomb doesn’t matter. She’s the twin who survived. She must still be alive. I look at the painting again, hoping to see red or green, but I stop myself. No, I’ll never be tricked by those colors again. I don’t need them. I look back at the girl, who is familiar somehow. Not just because of the features she shares with her mother, or because I see a bit of her father in her even though I’ve only met him once. No, I’ve seen this person before. But she’s a child, and I rarely deal with children in my work. I’ve never been around any of my own children at this age—maybe my Ascalon will be the first.

  I tell my iE to shine a light on the painting, but it doesn’t help to jar my memory. I instruct it to zoom in on the face of the girl and project it on the wall. It’s tough to resist fixating on the one eyeless socket, but I try. Still nothing. This definitely isn’t a person I’ve met. If anything, it’s a person I’ve glimpsed. Maybe in a crowd. Walking along a dock, holding her father’s hand. At one of Akeem’s Friday Night Prawn Bakes? A girl with her family, watching the prawns climb over each other while being boiled by their own moisture. How could I forget a face so distinctive, a face so sad? I stare at the picture and slowly walk my memory backward. I project a holo of my recorded experiences, rewinding everything I have seen from the present back. I watch carefully.

  I find I don’t need to go that far back.

  I tell my iE to layer blue over the girl’s face.

  When was the last time I actually looked at a teenager? For years, I’ve seen them as ignorant life forms with no respect for or memory of the past. Like the red ones hanging out in the float burbs, alternating boredom and mock indifference. They’ve interested me zero for decades. I’m an old man, for Christ’s sake. And I’ve never really cared about kids.

  But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe I’ve never found find them worth looking at because they didn’t live through the end of the world. I despised them because they weren’t there when we were taught that life should be appreciated. So I clumped them into a group I thought appreciated nothing at all. And maybe I didn’t realize that looking at them reminded me of my own dead son.

  I look back down at the girl’s face, now tinged with blue. I tell my iE to darken the tones even further. To give her pink hair.

  I take the painting off the wall. I put my thumb over the scarred forehead and empty socket.

  It’s him. It’s the blue boy I saw in the elevator the day I found Akira’s body. The one with pink hair covering the right half of his face. He was getting out of the elevator I stepped into and took 177 atmospheres down. He even had a tail, like the baby in Akira’s tomb. I missed it.

  He passed me in a color I could see. Why didn’t I see green? Because I wasn’t looking then. I was preoccupied with the reflection of an old man failing his family. I was too busy looking at myself.

  I recall that day: my mood, my exhaustion, not from a bad day, but from what I saw as a bad life. I was about to pander for a job I didn’t want but knew I needed. I was being needled by my wife, who resented the closeness I shared with the woman I was about to see, which perhaps made me resent Sabrina even more. I wanted the elevator going down 177 atmospheres to implode from the atmospheric pressure with me in it.

  I ignored that teenage boy, as she knew I would. It was the perfect disguise for a woman who’d just killed her own mother. And right at the moment I might have instinctively done a double take, the woman, the weary renter, her skirt malfunctioned. Was that deliberate too?

  The lights shut off, leaving only the paused projection. I try to turn, but my hands are stuck to the painting. I try to pull them off what feels like some kind of powerful adhesive, but other parts of me are getting stuck while I fight. I strain until my muscles shake. I can feel my skin tearing. If I’ve got a phobia, it’s this. Not being able to move.

  As I struggle, my iE goes to sleep, and soon I’m collapsed onto the painting, my chest and the right side of my face stuck to it. I strain to get up but can’t. The only muscle moving now is my heart, which is beating so hard that I can’t breathe. Pain creeps from my back up to my neck. The trembling spreads to my jaw and my teeth, even the fake ones. If I could move, I’d rip all of them out.

  Then comes a woman’s voice, right next to me.

  “You have a lovely family.”

  I tremble slightly. She’s here.

  I feel warm breath brush my earlobe. “Hello.”

  I try to turn my head but can’t. She runs her hand through my hair. “Did you love her?” she asks.

  I don’t answer.

  A pause. “I was six when she painted that,” the voice says. “My first year at boarding school. I remember missing my father, wondering why he sent me away. What I had done wrong. This was, of course, years before you murdered him.”

  The last sentence makes me shiver. But the presence of the person I’ve been looking for breathes a second wind into me—I’ve still got some fight left. But I don’t use it to try to peel myself off the painting. I concentrate. I calm down and try to listen.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “I understand why you did it. Sometimes it’s necessary.”

  “You look lonely there,” I say.

  “I was. Jerry Caldwell only visited from time to time. They told me she was my ‘benefactor.’ I didn’t talk much during those days. Then came the hospital after I took my eye out. The therapists tried to get me to speak. But what’s wrong with not speaking?”

  I hear footsteps head behind the bar. I try to imagine her feet. Small, like Akira’s? I remember that t
he girl in the painting is barefoot. She had her father’s feet: big, good for swimming. Blades of grass choked between her toes.

  The footsteps stop. “This painting was from the first day I met Akira.”

  “She showed up because of what you did to yourself,” I say. The pain in my mouth eases. The straight-line ache from my tailbone to my neck fades into spasms. The talking soothes my body.

  “Yes,” the voice says. “She was disgusted when she showed up and looked at me. But even worse, she tried to convince me she wasn’t, and to prove it, she said she wanted a keepsake. She asked me to pose with five other children in front of the giant banyan tree.”

  “And you refused,” I say.

  “I refused to look at her. She gave all of us candy. While the other children ate theirs, I threw mine in the pond. She actually begged. Can you imagine that? The great Akira Kimura, begging? But I wouldn’t budge. Then she screamed at me and called me ungrateful. When I still refused, she asked Jerry to paint from the other side of the tree. For some reason, I didn’t have a problem with that. I just wouldn’t face her.”

  “You were angry,” I say. My eyes are adjusting to the dark.

  “I am angry.”

  “Even then, you knew she was your mother, even if she didn’t admit it.”

  “Of course. I knew the first time I saw her. Has that ever happened to you? You take one look at a person and just know who they are? Her sullen insomniac eyes, broad shoulders like a swimmer’s, hands and feet so small and different from mine except for the curvature of her nail beds. I asked her if she was my mother. She said no, that she was Aunt Akira. She was a beautiful liar, even back then. But she was ashamed of me.”