When the Light Lay Still

by Charles J. Eskew

  “I haven’t got the flavour sorted yet, but someday, sooner than I could have without Thurgood’s resources and capital, we can use produce to alleviate chemical imbalance, rejuvenate niacin receptors in nicotine addicts, stimulate appetite. A world of hurts, fixed by a tomato.” She was clearly impressed with herself. I was too, but I wasn’t inclined to show it.

  “Neat,” I mouthed, dropping the rest of it to the ground.

  We’d reached the end of the adolescent boy’s attention; Elijah left us to find another cult member’s brain to pick. I watched him run off and turned back to Feng.

  “If you fill my boy’s head with your Brotherhood bullshit, I will kill you,” I said, half expecting some form of retribution. More than her polite nod, anyway.

  “I understand your concern, truly,” Feng said. “The others… they don’t want to cause you any harm, professor, not the ones Thurgood posts here, at least. To tell you the truth, we couldn’t use these weapons against you, or your son, even if we wanted.”

  She saw my expression, spun her gun out and aimed it at the ground. I’d never thought they could be so silent as they were in the movies, even with the bulky silencer on the end. She slowly raised it my way, other hand raised as though to reassure me. My fists tightened at my side, but I wouldn’t give her my fear. I waited for whatever she thought she had to deliver my way.

  Click!

  The gun stuttered and fell silent, and she refastened it to her side.

  “Pretty nifty, right? You and your son are safe here, professor. The chamber utilises a biometric—”

  “I’m not safe anywhere. I was working towards safe, my fucking life was working towards safe. Now what? Now, as far as the public is concerned, I’ve aligned myself with some fucking Black Panther Party wannabes. I’m this close to really, really bein’ the Bullet Bitch, and worst of all? I think I hate hot Cheetos now. So, fuck you, and fuck safe,” I said.

  Feng recoiled at this, but big ups to her for keeping that sweetly condescending smile.

  “Ma’am, we aren’t the monsters you think. We’re just people. Did you know that most of us here are college educated? Even the men. I’d say at least twice as many as have been incarcerated. Did you know that 52 percent of us here are women? That we have a voice here?”

  “Talking points, seriously?” I laughed. “You have done your research.”

  “I’m just trying to illustrate that maybe, if you took the time to stop hating him, you’ll begin to see us as people, trying to prove that we’re just that, fucking people,”she said. It was the first thing she said that didn’t sound rehearsed.

  She asked me to follow her through the house, to listen, and see her cohorts.

  She was wrong, of course. I did, and will forever see them as human, tragically so, which was all the more reason to hate them for being so wilfully blind.

  No pun intended.

  Eventually, she took me to the basement of the house, where other members of the Brotherhood were floating about. They would pop in and out of half-made rooms separated by tarps.

  There were smells, some familiar, some not so much. There was dank weed, there was gasoline, there was baked bread, they were as contradictory as their leader.

  “This is what we’re really about, doctor. Thurgood hasn’t just given us some frail promise of tomorrow; he’s backing us with the means to pursue it. We are all misfit toys, broken by a system that neglected us in one way or another. Stu over there? He’s working on a drone that can scan public record information instantly to avoid disasters,” she said, as a death less scattershot was somehow worth more.

  “McMahon, there? He is working to isolate the effect of Halcyon Daze that alters pigmentation perception. He hopes to weaponise it against the Judges and officers. Officers like the ones you yourself have been battling in a… more passive way.” She watched me for a reaction.

  “And… what? This is the wow moment that Thurgood cooked up to sway me?” I asked, breaking through the moment she’d no doubt thought she’d had. “You’ve ruined my career, you’ve ruinedthe credibility I’d built up, trying to stop this shit. You’ve done nothing but fall for someone’s shit about wanting to ‘fight back.’”

  There was the sigh, there was the smile, for a moment the empty, frilly, unbound things fell from her eyes.

  “And… I don’t know,” she said. “I’m trying here, ma’am, I’m trying, but I don’t think I can get you to see beyond your shit.”

  It jarred me a bit, even if I’d felt just as relieved to hit something real in her.

  “My shit is something that matters, Feng. My shit just wasn’t as flashy, as punk as yours. You know, Blacks made up—”

  “Talking points? Seriousl—?”

  “Blacks made up 34% of all people incarcerated in 2014. Did you know that? Do you know what the rate was after that?” I asked, and paused. Feng tried to wait me out, but if I was expected to play Thurgood’s games, she’d give me my fucking turn.

  “No,” she eventually said.

  “No? I don’t either. No one does. Back in the teens, they slashed funding to collect data like that. Shit like that is what renders us unseen, things like that are what skew our pain. Patriarchal, racial, socioeconomical, any fucking ‘al’ you want to pick, are bit by bit laying still. Thing is, while you all are out here playing college philosophy majors who shoot people in the fucking face, they are winning. There is a reason flash dance anarchy won’t work, Feng: it’s because the powers that be, are the powers that be. That power has to be redistributed before you could ever hope for something new.” I was monologuing, but I didn’t give a shit.

  “That’s just… No, professor. I’m sorry, I wanted you to see the truth of it all, more than Thurgood, I think. Our revolution isn’t opposed to yours.” She gave a nod to two cloaked crassholes, who made their way towards us.

  “Doctor Monroe is tired,” Feng said. “Please escort her to her room.” She tore her eyes away from us before I could look into them with my own any longer.

  Two men came up behind me, clutching me under the arms, but I darted forward before they could get a firm grip. Feng tried to spin round, whipping out the gun that she’d promised could do nothing to me, but she was too slow, or I wanted it more. I landed on top of her, clawing at her and seething obscenities through spit.

  “Crazy ass—!”

  My hand across her face cut her off. I thought of Elijah. Slap. I thought of everything they wanted me to be in that house of blood and bullets, and all the things I thought I was above. Slap, slap! I thought of a lot of things as they tore me away.

  I was tossed into my room and locked tight like a hog in a pen.

  While, in my humble opinion, the display lacked the subtlety of my Bullet Bitch days, it worked well enough. To believe in a peace, a world uncursed in the tomorrow, in all those punk albums, doesn’t mean sitting still and turning cheeks. It means fighting—sometimes, in times like this, more literally than others.

  I waited until the night fell before reaching to my backside to take out the phone I’d pilfered from Feng.

  I made a call.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “HE WOULD HAVE had a birthday next Thursday.”

  When Cadet Jones heard Marisa’s voice behind him, a small, unseared part of him was impressed. Had she been in the room the whole time?

  Ezekiel considered her for a moment, the increasingly tattered trench coat, the increasingly tattered eyes, and then forced himself to continue packing his scant belongings.

  “Why are you here, ma’am?” Ezekiel asked, done with games and arguments and anything that wouldn’t put him in a plane to the first city he saw on the departure screen when he went to the airport.

  It hadn’t been a full hour since Jones had dumped his former bunkmate in the medical ward, bloody hand wrapped in a paper towel.

  “His mother and father have divorced, they sold the house. Can’t blame them, seeing what he could have been if some dumbass hadn’t killed their s
on.”

  “Stop it.”

  “The asking price is pretty shit, might be worth renting out, so, if this whole most-important-thing-of-your-life doesn’t work out, you can get into real estate maybe.” Marisa shrugged.

  “Did you know this would happen? Is this another test, ma’am?” Jones demanded, tossing the last T-shirt into the duffle bag.

  “Officer Williams is getting a Merit Award for excellent arrest. Your old drinking buddies are proud of her too. Guess you may not have got the invite to the celebration tomorrow at your old station.”

  Marisa was unfazed as Ezekiel’s eyes bored into her own. He walked to her, to Ocasio’s bed, close enough to taste her.

  “Why. The fuck. Are you here, ma’am?”

  “What the fuck are you doing here, cadet?” Marisa said, startling Ezekiel with her sharpness. “You were my first recommendation for this program, did you know that? No, of course you didn’t, and you don’t know why that is a big enough deal for me to occasionally check in on you, either. You think, what? This shit was going to be boot camp? Police academy? You think you just get straight As, put on a bitch face and boom, you’re a Judge? You think there wouldn’t be sacrifice, little boy?” Her laugh did nothing to betray the lightning building behind her eyes.

  “So, what? You telling me that Fox’s or Stein’s homo-murderous bullshit is something new? It was more gratuitous, more—”

  “Oh, for chrissakes, Tank, do you think we give two craps who you’re banging? You think we don’t know, in more detail than I like, which of you entitled emo rabbits are screwing each other over here? Getting laid doesn’t stop you becoming a Judge, Cadet Jones. What does, however, is Valentine’s Day shit. That will compromise you.

  “Tell me, how is Cadet Ocasio’s brother? We have video surveillance, Tank. We have the goddamned search history, so don’t tell me you haven’t accessed private record data under the guise of a superior—which, while impressive, is a gross misuse of access you shouldn’t have had.”

  It was Ezekiel’s turn to hold back a flinch.

  “You’re saying, what, then? That this was for me? You’re saying that I was your choice, and this gives you the right to—”

  “What we’re saying, Ezekiel, is that Cadet Ocasio was shown to have too much baggage, too much held over from the old guard. He was never going to make it. We saw a cadet break reg for said space waste, and thought it important to evaluate their resolve—”

  “‘Resolve’? What the shit does that even mean? He cut his hand open.”

  “That… wasn’t what was discussed. Fox will be removed from that post, I swear, and I’m sorry, Ezekiel. But only for that.” She was honest, she was vulnerable, but she wasn’t at any point ready to concede that all of it was, as Ezekiel saw it, fucked.

  “So, what? You here to ask me to stay?” he said, nearing the door of the room.

  “I’m here to remind you that you were always going to stay. That… that’s okay. I’m here to remind you not to let this moment obscure what you are doing here, Cadet.”

  “Wooowww, you really—I’m not an idiot, ma’am. I’m not—”

  “—anything, Cadet Jones. You. Are. Nothing. Okay, you were gifted, that’s not—you were and are barely a citizen, Ezekiel. What did you do? What was it you were fighting for? You lived in an empty canvas, you didn’t have so much as a TubeFlix account for us to measure interests by. You just had the night. When the day went dead, you became something, the only thing that meant you were here, alive.”

  He wanted to laugh. He wanted to do anything but acknowledge that his hand had left the doorknob.

  “How do you create a new guard, Cadet Jones? Better yet, how do you create a new guard from the scraps of the old? We can’t enlist children—not yet anyway—and we can only work with what we have. Most of them come with baggage, including the ones who have a shot in hell of making it. Brass tacks, though? You’re different, Jones. You are a single, highly accredited officer who at most could pretend to be one of them, who could play in a softball league or grab a beer or talk at a fucking school career day, for their trust. For them to leave you alone and complete your directive.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck me?” She smirked. “Well, never said you were a wordsmith; but more importantly, why are you pretending right now, Cadet Jones? We both know why you’re still here, and we both know how this ends. Because you need someone else who sees, like you did back when you took down a tank with a single bullet. You didn’t care about the protesters when you jumped in front of it, did you? You cared that there was an inconsistency, that order was being grossly ignored.”

  “They always say it was a tank, it was just an armoured truck—”

  “You’re right, that completely counters my point,” Marisa said drily. She rose from the bed with a groan. “Truth is, Tank: if you leave? This all continues. Truth is, Ocasio is going to go home, a little light in the digits, but alive. And you are going to stay, because you’re done with them, you’re done trying to reason and empathise with them, and you know what they really need is for us to take control.”

  Cadet Jones, somehow, grew more solemn.

  “The riot was destroying the city, and you didn’t quite know if that was a bad thing, did you? You didn’t need to, though. You knew that what was happening was chaos. The protesters, the police, they were all afraid. They had power, and they had bad intel, but they also had the full authority to use what force they needed to stop a group of dumbasses from tagging their building.”

  “Stop it… ”

  “They called you a hero, a goddamn genius. You had, what? A 9mm? You told them to stop too, right? You forgot about protocol and fired a single shot, one impossible shot that through the grace of leprechauns or whatever, to make it fall apart.

  “You only cared about the law, Jones. You only cared about doing something to make you matter. That cold? That blind adherence to what is right over what is easy? That is what makes you what this country needs. We don’t need any more Ocasios—or, if I’m being honest, any Foxes, either. You know that, don’t you? The truth is, if you leave, it continues, and we’re stuck with schmucks like Fox who are still afraid. He’ll be dealt with. Trust that. Don’t let a hookup ruin everything you are here for, everything we need.”

  Cadet Jones waited for the time to come where the hand would move, and let him fall from the high ground he’d lived in his whole life and into the pit with the rest of the citizens. It didn’t. He walked back and sat on the bed, slumping down and burying his head into his hands.

  “What do I do, ma’am?” he said, after a time he couldn’t measure.

  Pellegrino sat lightly on Cadet Jones’s bed beside him. She placed a hand over his back, rubbing slow circles over it and letting a smile strain out.

  “You do what you’re told, cadet,” she said sweetly, and, looking up, Judge Jones nodded.

  CHAPTER NINE

  WHEN POET TOOK his first life, he had, only moments before, wrapped up the final edit of his high school valedictorian speech.

  He heard the cries for help, for something as silly as justice, Poet made his way to his mother’s bedroom in the hopes that for once it would prove to be a mistaken case of carnal cries.

  It wasn’t. It was the same thing that sent his sister away to boarding school in escape. It was the same thing his mother told him to not pay any mind to. It was his mother’s face, cratered swelling.

  His father, whose last breath bore that clichéd stench of weakness and whiskey, had seemed surprised when Young Poet came in with death in his hands. He held the gun lightly, more carrot than stick, before passing the ultimate judgement on his father.

  When his mother decided to defend the dead man rather than her son in court, Young Poet had the composure of a man who’d never had a free meal ticket. The more surprising development, however, was his choice to defend himself; the papers called him insane.

  Tragic as it’d been to lose the opportunity to give a listl
ess valedictorian speech, there was some victory in what he gained.

  He learned that the only thing that really mattered, at the end of the day, were the words; pretty words in pretty books to defend his less-than-pretty soul from conviction. If not for that, scouring night after night through texts on law, on philosophy, on an asphyxiated understanding of life, he may never have become the man that dragged Ezekiel Jones from the wreckage of the warehouse.

  He would have never been approached by a former classmate, some scrawny whelp who’d taken up the school honour of valedictorian after the whole ‘murder’ thing disqualified Young Poet. The young man had made good use of his life, more than Poet had—or at least, that was his thought meeting the Harvard Law student who changed the course of his life forever.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked, sat across from Poet in the diner. “You know—that doesn’t matter. Do you think it was right? Do you ever wonder if you should have done time for taking a life?” It wasn’t a question you would ask someone you’ve only shared one class with. Asked it he did though, and Community College Student Poet mulled it over without so much as a frown.

  “I suppose I could understand that, but no. No, I don’t. The law is a blankie. It’s—”

  “Trivial?” the law student asked, or demanded. Poet only smiled, if with something a bit more magnetic than was there before.

  “No. Shit, no. It’s the most terrifying, powerful bit of nothing. It’s only trivial, like any story, when there are too many inconsistencies. I was told time and time again that what I did was incredible, defending myself with no prior experience; that I’d earned people’s respect. That’s where I find my why, and how, at night. I saw something wrong, I made it right. Justice isn’t just words, it’s what we do with it.” He wasn’t sure why he needed the man to hear him.

  The law student smirked. “I think that’s very poetic, apologies for the pun. Granted… it’s a bit of a mixed metaphor there, is it a story or a tool?”

  “Oh, well, I don’t know about that. What is any story if not a tool of one kind or another?”