Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  “So cute!” one of the red girls, squatting in front of Ascalon, says. She’s a friendly kid.

  Ascalon pulls at the girl’s bracelet. The girl laughs. She takes it off her wrist and gives it to Ascalon. “She can keep it,” the girl says.

  “No, that’s okay,” I say. “You don’t have to give it to her.”

  The girl shrugs. “I’ll get another one. They’re free.”

  “Oh yeah?” I ask. “From where?”

  The girl frowns. “They’re everywhere. In memory of Akira Kimura.”

  The teens head to the vac tube train stop to wait for the ride they already missed. I look back at the old couple sitting on the bench. They’re wearing the bracelets, too. I squat in front of Ascalon to take a closer look. Surprisingly, the character isn’t Akira’s family name, but the same katakana for Ascalon I saw out there on that tombstone. So it begins. Gods don’t make us into their images, we make gods into ours. I think about The Book of Ascalon. I understand the pain its author has been through, even though she’s murdered those closest to her and has threatened my family. I’ve had run-ins with my share of criminals, and they tend to have things in common. Bruised fruit tends to mold more quickly than the rest. This is no exception. I’m no exception. Akira, too. Lost her father at a young age. Hid behind her education and was thrust into a new country not that long after. Made some bad decisions—really bad ones—and got scared of losing everything she’d built. Nothing leads to more mistakes than trembling empires. Fucking criminals, trying to preserve their own importance. And I’m one of them.

  Two friendly looking women in suits walk toward me and Ascalon. They stop in front of us. I put a hand on the handle of the gun tucked in the small of my back. “What a cute baby,” the one with curly hair says.

  I pick Ascalon up with my free arm. She’s busy trying to rip the bracelet on her wrist apart. “Thanks,” I say.

  “We’re with the FBI,” the other with straight black hair says. They send their IDs to my iE. Both named Ascalon. They send a Federal subpoena next. I take my hand off my gun. “Nothing here about Jerry Caldwell,” I say. My daughter is really pulling at the bracelet now, stretching the rubber band that holds it together to its very limits.

  “The grand jury is convening over the matter of Akira Kimura’s death,” curly haired Ascalon says. “The Caldwell murder is a state matter.”

  I read the subpoena on my new iE. Three days. They aren’t wasting time. I know better than to ask questions or get into any kind of conversation. I need a lawyer. And the best one I know is dead, killed by a one-eyed psychopath trying to write the next holy book for the entire human race. I know what she would have told me. Limit your exposure, Jerry used to always say. I can’t afford a lawyer. I can’t afford to fight. I feel myself hugging my kid a little tighter than she likes, but she’s rolling with it. Maybe she can sense my anxiety. My god, I think. These last few days. My dad’s favorite old cliché comes to mind: The hits just keep on coming. “Thanks,” I say, trying to keep my expression neutral. “I’ll be there.”

  The two agents wave goodbye to Ascalon, then walk away. They’re wearing the bracelets as well. I look at my baby. “I know what you’re thinking,” I say. “I should tell them everything.”

  Still working the bracelet, she ignores me, which she’s wonderfully good at. I look over as the docks work themselves up from a yawn into a stretch. The early morning exercisers, the old who cannot sleep past six in the morning. Kids in front of the vac tube train stop off to underwater school.

  We turn around and start heading back, and as we do, I ping Akeem and ask him for a favor. He agrees. And even though I’ve got twenty years on him, he ends the call by saying, in a fatherly tone, that no one goes it alone.

  I’m in real trouble here. This grand jury thing. A special prosecutor. Probably the best. Special prosecutors have taken down presidents before. I’m not terrified, because I know I didn’t do it and that they don’t have the evidence to put me away, but they might be able to get me on tampering with a crime scene, or start digging into my past. It’s funny . . . A day ago, I was ready to spend the rest of my life in jail for a crime I didn’t commit. Now I’m scared shitless of someone who’s just gonna ask questions. Maybe that’s because when I was on Vomit Island, I knew my family was set. That gem was gonna put Sabrina and Ascalon up for life. But if I go down now, they’ll be in danger. And I’ve seen the face of that danger, along with the capabilities of the dangerous mind behind it.

  Ascalon stretches the bracelet and lets go. It slingshots into the water. “Exactly, kid,” I say. “Exactly.” She laughs. I fake a laugh with her, then put her down and grab her hand before heading home. I look up at the sky. It was real, I tell myself. The evidence is right there. But doubt begins to creep in. I picture Sabrina’s frown again. I haven’t been thinking about what I actually saw back then. I’ve been thinking about what I didn’t see.

  When we get inside, Sabrina is programming the walls a light shade of green and red. It’s blinding to me, but she means well, probably figures that it’ll help me get used to the colors, so I don’t say that it looks like Christmas exploded in here. She’s amazing, this wife of mine. I wonder if this is a common occurrence in marriage—turn drama into matrimonial parody when crisis hits. Ascalon’s commentary on our lives hit Sabrina harder than it did me. “When did devotion to family become something to laugh at?” she said.

  “When her mother snapped her sister’s neck,” I said. It worried me that Sabrina was so focused on the part about us and not all the other stuff. The other stuff was definitely more of a threat.

  I put Ascalon down for a nap and tell Sabrina about the FBI and the subpoena. But Ascalon won’t sleep. She’s crying for her mother. Sabrina bites her lip to strategize, just like she used to back in her pulse racket days. “The Feds,” she says. “First, they ruin you. Then they throw you in jail.”

  For Less Thans like us, we never feel so acutely poor as when we hit legal troubles. “True,” I say. “But you need to be guilty for them to do all that.”

  “It was a long time ago. It was martial law. Executive order.”

  “Not all of them.”

  Sabrina sighs and shakes her head. Ascalon is still crying.

  “I should go in and plead guilty to Jerry’s murder,” I say. And I wonder why I say it. Am I testing my wife? That’s just plain stupid. I head to Ascalon’s room. “You’ll get the bail money back sooner,” I can’t help adding.

  Sabrina follows. “No.”

  I step into the room and pick up Ascalon. She stops crying. I brush her little bald head with my lips. She smells brand-new. “I’m toast,” I say. “I can face the Federal stuff on Vomit Island.”

  “What about Ascalon Lee?”

  “I pinged Akeem. We talked about it, and I’d like you guys to stay with him for now. His place is isolated, and he’s got top-notch security.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I need to talk to someone.”

  “Who?” Sabrina asks. She puts Ascalon down. Ascalon crawls into the living room like she senses the beginning of an argument and wants no part of it.

  “Chief of Staff Chang,” I say.

  “Why? Is he still alive?”

  “Hanging in there at 115, the last I heard.”

  “Where?” Sabrina asks.

  “I don’t know. Easy enough to find out, though.”

  “But you’re not supposed to leave the state. And we have that other mess to deal with. Why is this so important?”

  I grab Sabrina’s hand and squeeze. “I need to know if Sessho-seki was real,” I almost whisper. And it’s true, even if I know it’s selfish. “I need to know if all of this was for nothing.”

  “And Ascalon Lee?” Sabrina asks.

  I touch my nose and think about Ascalon Lee and how she probed it. It’s not sore anymore, and I’m w
orried I’ll forget. Stop appreciating what I’ve got and unwittingly loosen my hold on it. But the fear of death is already fading from me. And I know that’s stupid. I start having other stupid thoughts, like maybe we’re designed to die the way our fathers did. Mine went by deep-diving too many times. I feel like I’m doing the same thing.

  “She’s no Ascalon. She’s The Killing Rock, and she’s coming for me. But I’ll be ready.”

  Sabrina kisses me on my cheek, lets go of my hand, and heads to the living room. I think about the prospect of spending the rest of my life in jail without my wife, without my child, and it shakes me. For the past few years, even up until couple of days ago, that thought didn’t bother me. What changed, and why so quickly? I’m questioning how well I know myself. The colorblind boy who watched his father die. The pianist, the art history major, the army sniper. The cop with synesthesia who thought he could see, smell, and hear murder. Husband of four, father of three—one lost. A friend to The Money, surrounding himself with them despite the fact that he never had any. The man whose self-worth hinged on a handful of clever murders. What kind of man prides himself on killing innocent people? The answer is easy. A bad one. Even if those were done in service of saving the world, which it turns out they may not have been. I pray that Akira didn’t do all of this for her own deification.

  I walk to the living room. Ascalon points to the wall and says, “Ish.” For some reason, “ish” means “show.” She wants her program projected. Sabrina turns it on. A fly chased by a frog. A frog chased by a cat. A cat chased by a dog. They run in circles around the room. A true classic. “I want to come with you,” Sabrina says.

  “I’d like nothing more. But I have a hunch.”

  “A hunch about what?”

  “She knows where I am. She’ll follow me, and maybe I can end it,” I say. “Far away from you and Ascalon. I’ll call a heli-taxi for you two to head to Akeem’s. You’ll be safe there.”

  Sabrina hugs me and tells me she loves me. I say the same. I kiss Ascalon on the forehead and look at her. She ignores me, her toes clenched as usual as she watches her show. I put on a thin, hooded overcoat and put Ascalon Lee’s book into one of its pockets. I take out the last remaining 1911 from a vacuum-sealed drawer in the kitchen and look at it. The mirror-polished stainless steel, the decorative detective badge on its handle. A relic, like me. But an effective relic, maybe also like me. I leave it on the kitchen counter before I walk out the door. This family is down to one gun now, and I want Sabrina to hold on to it. While I’m walking along the docks to the hover, I wonder if this kind of love can last. I wonder how much a person can put up with until it breaks. At least if I die, bail will go back to them, and Ascalon Lee has no reason to be interested in my family.

  I climb into Sabrina’s hover, work the pedals, and take off. I head to the shuttleport, where one of Akeem’s private shuttles awaits. I notice that my own toes are clenched. That’s a habit of mine too, isn’t it? Before pulling a trigger, while I pilot, working a case. I think about Ascalon doing the same thing in the float burbs below. Children sometimes remind us who we are. It’s sad that we need to be reminded.

  23

  Chief of Staff Chang lives in Muskogee, Oklahoma, which is about fifty miles south of Tulsa, the south end of The Great Leachate. I spend the trip calling up some Shelley on my iE. First, I get a bunch of confusing old-ass poetry by some guy. Then my iE notifies me that the Romantic poet had a wife, who wrote Frankenstein. I obviously know it but have never read it. I get about ten percent in before deciding that you’ve gotta be stark raving mad to get through this book, much less quote it from memory. Makes sense for that particular mother and daughter pairing.

  I fly over the great towers of cubed trash covering the 200,000 square miles of contaminated puddle that stretches from Lake Michigan. The vast majority of Midwesterners migrated out when the groundwater started killing people, so the government decided to cover it with the nation’s trash. Then it took foreign trash for profit. The money helped to pay for the Desert Storm wars, which weren’t wars between countries, but wars between governments and corporations. It took those to get the world off fossil fuels, just like it took wars to get off monarchy, slavery, and genocide. I caught the tail end of Desert Storm, but the Leachate Migration was before my time. Word is that there are hidden tunnels amidst the trash where the poor live—The Zeroes, who the rest of us aren’t sure really exist.

  Muskogee was a river port town back in the day. Those are as extinct as silver mining and dude ranch towns. Penicillin still flows through its waters, since we gave up on fixing the landlocked and turned to the ocean before I was born. Muskogee is one of the few middle-American specs left from the twenty-first century, still run by cords and wires. A place, like many, that never bounced back from the Leachate Migration and the Great Sun Storm that dropped the planes out of the sky when Akira and I were kids. Like the other nearby municipalities, it’s one broken hip away from becoming a ghost town. While I’m on Akeem’s human waste-fueled, private shuttle hovering over this dust bowl, I think about something Akira told me once. A thought Ascalon Lee also had in forced hibernation. We live in a zombie galaxy that died seven billion years ago. We revolve around a post-mortem star, built from the cosmic debris of the one before it. We, like Muskogee down below, don’t matter to anyone but the planet’s current inhabitants.

  After I land at the deserted air strip, I ask my iE how to get transportation into town. It pings a taxi for me, and I sit and wait. I’m surprised when I see a ground-based automobile rumble to me. The driver, a woman smoking an actual cigarette, asks me where to. I ask her if she knows where Chief of Staff Chang lives. She asks me who the hell Chief of Staff Chang is, and says that as far as she knows, there ain’t no Chinamen that live in these parts. So I ask her to take me to town. She nods and drops me off at the hardware store. Never having been in a hardware store before, I step inside.

  I always figured do-it-yourself was as extinct as river port towns, but it appears to be on life support in Muskogee. The place is packed with plastic tubes, fixtures, and actual metal screws and bolts. The only person inside is the owner, a really tall old guy, maybe seven feet, with cataracts and a bent back. He asks if he can help me. I ask him about Chief of Staff Chang. He nods and says the old man lives out in old Park Tree Plaza building. He says I can’t miss it. Like him, it’s the tallest in town.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “What do you want with him, anyway?” the owner asks.

  “I’ve gotta ask him something,” I say. “Hear his take, which is maybe the truth.”

  “He lives on the sixth floor,” the owner says. “Penthouse. I go out there once a month to make sure the place is running, replace the odd part here and there.”

  “How is he?” I ask.

  “He and this town are competing to see who outlasts the other. My money’s on him.”

  “I don’t mean to sound like an asshole, but why would you stay in a town you know is dying?”

  The tall man grins. “Keeping a thing alive gives me purpose. What’s yours?”

  I nod but don’t answer. “Is the Plaza in walking distance?”

  “About a mile up Thurston. Corner of Blackstone.”

  I thank him. It then occurs to me that I have no weapon, not that I need one to talk to a 115-year-old man. But I’ve got caveman blood in me and figure I should grab something just in case. She’s out there somewhere. But for some reason, I feel good about where I’ve landed, a place with streets and corners. No suction-cup security or tat-dyed kids. I’ll see that blue woman coming from a mile away, especially during the day. I purchase a used utility heat blade that’s probably older than me. I put it in the pocket opposite the one with Ascalon’s book and head out.

  It’s a strange feeling walking up an actual street fronted by buildings made of concrete. Passing parked cars on rubber wheels. Old-school drones wash windows and sw
eep the streets. There’s a green exterminator van that rolls by. I grip the knife’s hilt, ready to tango if it stops and trouble jumps out. Exterminators seem redundant for this place, with all the poison flooding through the environment. I wonder where the van is heading.

  A block up, the streets are empty. I think about the few people who live here and figure they’re just like the rest of us. People who see this occasionally wonderful, occasionally horrible, monotonous existence as good enough. It’s all a spinning grinder that sputters along until its bearings pop and clank on a perfectly level floor, rolling around chasing something that ain’t there. I’d love to believe in one last surprise when my springs fracture and my life belt snaps instead of some inevitable malfunction, a frightening, regretful, final pain. There ain’t no pill for that. No chamber. Ask Akira or Jerry or Kathy or John. My parents. The people I killed. I think back to Professor Brum and wonder if things might’ve been different had she lived.

  I get to Park Tree Plaza, which sits in front of a massive tree and next to a broken-down Ferris wheel. It’s an old condo, and I’m talking twentieth-century old, basically a tall box built of cinderblocks. I swing open the glass door and enter the lobby. Floor cobbled with ceramic tile. Grass growing through cracked grouting. I turn right and head to the elevator. I press the button. Red. I’m beginning to notice how many buttons in this world are red. It lights up, and I’m surprised how fast the elevator doors open. I step inside, and there’s only one button, a plastic black one that reads six. All that’s left of the other buttons are metal threads protruding from the elevator wall. I press six. The elevator sounds like it runs on belts made of old metal chains. If I were a machine, this is probably what my body would sound like.