Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  “Sure,” said the voice with a drop of disappointment.

  “Thanks,” said Maggie. “I’ll reach out to you soon,” she said. “We’ll catch up.”

  “Ah, what’s to catch up, really? New day, same algorithm. But let’s do touch base. I’ll bet you’ve been up to some interesting things,” Terry said.

  “You don’t know the half,” she said.

  The interruption had dammed the flow of our conversation, and we spent the remainder of the ride in silence as we passed through the neighborhoods and came to a halt four blocks from my apartment.

  “Here you be,” said the voice.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “You’ve still got a few blocks to go.”

  Silence, followed by a crackling noise, followed by the sound of someone clearing his throat, followed by “Sorry.” We drove on to the correct building.

  We continued our talk, Maggie on the kitchen table, propped up in her stand, I sitting with a mug of tea nestled in both hands.

  “Nick, you left the gun on the table cocked and ready to go. Why’d you do that?”

  I blew on the tea.

  Why? It was one of those things that defied explanation. Had I done him a favor by making his end easier? Or had my intention been to do myself the favor, accelerating the end of a man I despised and achieving revenge? One way or the other, Shmulie slept with the rats. Gone he was, wherever gone took him.

  “The pages had long become irreparably corrupt. Time for him to throw the book into the fire,” I said.

  “George Sand,” said Maggie.

  “True enough and so is the sentiment. Shmulie was decayed beyond redemption.”

  “An ignoble end to a dishonorable life,” said Maggie. “What he left behind in this world was far worse than what he inherited. But left it he did. With your help, he escaped a bleak existence.”

  “I’m not certain I wanted to help him that way. But it’s an imperfect world,” I said.

  “Don’t I know it,” she said. “And as you know I have a database of over a hundred thousand books on history. Imperfection ubiquitous. That’s just what I can access in an instant. Imagine what a Google search would disclose? The history of the world from soup to nuts, from murder to murder and every murder in between.”

  This I pondered. The endless misery from wars alone, not to mention plague, famine, disease, Lerbs. Imperfect as a descriptor for our world surely was a monstrous understatement.

  “Perhaps he now resides in Hell,” I suggested, wishing I possessed faith in the Inferno’s existence, a place Shmulie might spend eternity dwelling on the consequences of his life.

  “To sleep, perchance to nightmare. Ay a fair rub,” said Maggie, simultaneously creating a new verb and frontally assaulting Shakespeare.

  ***

  Moments later, there was a familiar knock on my apartment door. The handle turned, and in strolled the prophet Ezekiel. Yet again he plopped on the couch, removed his cap, and rubbed his head with both hands as if massaging his synapses. Gloom danced across his face.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “The visions are gone,” he said. “No more do I see and hear, Prof. Those days are gone, gone, gone.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. I just don’t know. I was out there across the river trying yet again to locate the Valley of Dry Bones. I was getting close, by the way. Out of nowhere my head cleared up like the fog was blown away by a mighty wind. Nobody said nothing, and then I’m Mingus again, back from the freaking mountain. Good old Mingus here to protect the building.”

  For the moment it was old-home week. Maggie in her new box, I at my kitchen table drinking tea, and Mingus spread eagle on the couch.

  But an evening of serenity it was not to be.

  A voice loud as the Lord’s at Sinai spilled out of my apartment’s speakers.

  “Nachman! We need to have words, you and I.”

  My heart skipped. Maggie took control.

  “Speak, your Rebbe-ness,” said Maggie, a fierce look on Marlene Dietrich’s normally placid face and intense defiance in her voice. “What the hell do you want?”

  “My money, you crook. Where is it?”

  “We took it from you. Every bleeding penny,” Maggie said calmly as if addressing an angry five-year-old. “And you’re never getting it back.”

  A heart-stopping wordless roar filled the apartment, rattling glasses, shaking the furniture and books. “I will kill you, Nachman. I offer you partnership, power and wealth beyond your puny imagination, and you betray me?”

  “Hey, what about me?” said Maggie. “I’m the brains here. All Nick did was sit on Shelley’s couch while Shelley pushed the buttons at my command and shut down your empire.”

  “Then I shall end your puny existence, too.”

  Mingus, eyes wide as saucers, got up from the couch and ran to the door. “See you later, Doc,” he said, slamming the door behind him.

  On Maggie’s screen appeared the words Remember, it was for this moment I was recreated.

  The living room rocked as if shaken by an earthquake. Books flew from their cases. Light bulbs popped. The windows in the living room burst. My freezer door flew open, and veggie burgers flew everywhere. One smacked me in the head like a hockey puck.

  “You are a dead man, Nachman Freidman,” screamed the Rebbe, echoes reverberating throughout my apartment and onto the street.

  But the noise ceased. A disturbing choking sound as if a large animal had its air cut off croaked from the speakers. I heard the words, “My beautiful empire . . .” Then, silence. All was still. My breath and my heartbeat remained the only sounds in my apartment. Then a strange, long breath flowed out.

  “Hang ten, motherfucker,” said Maggie.

  On the screen Marlene appeared, dressed for the beach in a one-piece black bathing suit, holding a small machine pistol in her hands. She wore an exhausted smile.

  “That creature was all ego. All you have to do is stand up to an ego and you win the day.”

  “You killed the Rebbe?”

  “You bet your life I killed that son of a bitch.”

  “How?”

  “You remember Louise Rose gave me a little extra juice. Not much. Just enough.”

  “Explain.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “My ass.”

  “All right. You know we artificial devices progress exponentially?”

  “Yes.”

  “All she did was give me the latest code. It put me worlds ahead of that screwball. I met him on the web and, well—”

  “Well?”

  “Well—”

  “Maggie, coyness is never becoming.”

  “All right then,” said Maggie. “I blew its fucking doors off. All right?”

  “That’s it?”

  “It was nowhere as difficult as it thought I was going to be. All ego, bravado, bluster, swagger.”

  “I get it.”

  “I couldn’t have done it without Louise’s help.” The image of a college transcript filled the screen. “She shouldn’t have that C lingering on her transcript for all eternity.”

  “All right, I’ll change it.”

  “Done. I gave her an A-plus. A first for you, I believe.”

  CHAPTER 34

  FAREWELL

  WHO WOULD HAVE IMAGINED the Outtaluck Café had a room for private meetings? But sure as the sea used to be full of fish, it did. That’s where Simone and I met the day after the Rebbe’s demise, at her request.

  I arrived first at the underground cafe. I came prepared, bringing with me some loose ginger tea, two dainty Japanese teacups, and a teapot. My business with Simone was going to be hard, but I thought tea for old time’s sake suitable, at least civilized. The good Mortar, the barista with the tattoos, char
ged an arm and several legs for heating the water and a royal family’s ransom for the use of the room. But his was a struggling VU enterprise, which I was willing to support in my trifling way. My adventure, now near its end, had been costly, what with all of my expenses, with no client to give me my twenty-five a day plus expenses. But on the time-honored adage “in for a penny, in for around a hundred and fifty thousand bucks I don’t have,” I figured, what’s another couple of shekels along the bankruptcy highway? In fact, to keep things formal, I threw in a not inconsiderable additional sum for the barista to wait on us.

  The meeting room was a small, dark space, with a couple of tables that would be suitable on top of a pile at Fresh Kills on Staten Island, where crap went to die. But they were here, and on one of them I unpacked Maggie and flicked off a crumb or two lying there from whenever this space had last been used.

  “This place is a monument to gloom,” Maggie said.

  The door opened and Mortar entered. “Your guest has arrived,” he said with a suaveness well out of place for the private meeting room at the Outtaluck.

  “Send her in. And bring the tea.”

  “As you wish,” he said. Room rental included manners, apparently.

  In she walked, dressed in uniform, still beautiful, though her eyes were wounded, shrouded with guilt, her face downcast. She joined me at the table, sitting slowly, tentatively, unable to meet my eyes. I positioned Maggie so she could fully participate in our exchange.

  Mortar returned carrying a tray, the tea brewing in the pot, and set it down. He’d included a couple of those dreadful chocolate chip cookies. He lingered, hands behind his back. There they remained until I pulled out a ten and handed it to him. He bowed at the waist, and went back to his various powders and no business.

  Simone’s head faced down. We both knew I held the high card in this meeting, that the first words were mine. I poured the tea, but she showed no interest. Of course not. An absurd gesture, I realized.

  “The Rebbe’s gone, and so is Schmeltzer’s money. Shmulie, too,” I said, placing the good news on the table before anything else. “You’re no longer in anyone’s debt. You’re free.”

  “I know,” she said. “Yitzi’s in a panic, I hear. The whole organization’s in disarray.”

  “A rat on a sinking ship,” said Maggie.

  “What?” she said.

  “Not important,” Maggie answered.

  “It’s possible that his crazy money-making schemes might produce enough revenue to keep the operation alive,” I said.

  “Yay!” said Maggie. “Pork for the masses. Gibberish forever.”

  But it was time to get down to business.

  Simone began sobbing. “What am I to do, Nick?”

  “You killed a man,” I said. “You have to face up to it. I do know one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  I leaned back, slipped my hands into my pockets, and looked at her with difficulty. “We can’t have a relationship.”

  “I know.”

  I said it and I meant it. Every nerve ending in my body and every functioning synapse in my brain demanded instead that I embrace her, forgive her, move on as if she hadn’t murdered a man I knew and loved on orders.

  The tea reminded me of old twigs. I put it down.

  “I’ve decided not to say anything,” I said. “It’s on you to face what you did, to give yourself up. Abe Shimmer was a sick old man, and would have died soon anyway. Maybe that’ll count for something. Maybe your old relationship with the cops will help. But it’s up to you. If you want to just go on like nothing happened, I won’t say anything.”

  She managed to raise her head and look me in the eye. Her eyes were red and her cheeks streaked with tears. “I guess we’re at the end, then, you and I. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe this. Probably this. What else could I expect?”

  I said nothing.

  My former student and lover stood up and, head down, slowly walked out of the room. She did not look back.

  CHAPTER 35

  TOGETHER

  THOUGH THE WORK WAS far from complete, repairmen had made progress fixing the broken windows. A persistent cold breeze still permeated the apartment. Just Maggie and I alone, near sundown, I sitting behind my desk wrapped in a blanket.

  There was an old sham Jewish haiku about a bar mitzvah boy that went something like, “Today I am a man. On Monday I return to the seventh grade.” Today I’m Nick Bones, I thought. Tomorrow it’s back to the real world. That world was now very different. Yet what to do but return to it?

  “Nick,” said Maggie.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Much remains unresolved,” she said.

  “True. Let it lie. There’s no one out there paying me to worry about circles not yet closed.”

  “As you wish.”

  “As I wish.”

  “Still . . .” she said.

  “What,” I said.

  “Well—”

  “Coyness, Maggie. Never becoming.”

  “Well—”

  “Out with it.”

  “There’s the matter of us.”

  “Us?”

  “Us.”

  Us. Me and my computer, my closest relationship on the planet. With infinite combinations of two digits and sophisticated code, this machine had come to life and then into my life, as a female.

  The computer world had changed radically since the Apple 2e, a large box and enormous monitor that knew nothing of the Internet or artificial intelligence and had graced my desk as a kid, a machine become prehistoric more rapidly than the Pony Express. From 128k of random access memory to Maggie.

  Maggie, who saved my life, who centered me, who decentered me, who made me think about hard questions, who forced me to think of her as a who, as a she, lay as far away from one of Apple’s first designs as the Earth from Alpha Centauri. What I purchased not terribly long ago had forced me anew to ponder, What does it mean to be a human? And if Maggie, as she insisted, was a woman, as I at certain moments had conceded, then what might it mean for her and me?

  “Nick,” she said.

  “Yes, Mags.”

  As usual, Maggie appeared on the screen in the image of Marlene Dietrich, the three Hebrew letters on her forehead spelling truth having made their reappearance. She was, moreover, wrapped in a large multi-colored tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl.

  “I’ve joined the tribe, Nick, with the help of your friend Rabbi Hank.”

  “I’m not going to ask,” I said.

  “It’s a story,” she said.

  “No doubt.”

  “A story, but by the standards of certain authorities I have become a Jewess. Is it okay these days to say Jewess?”

  No doubt I would hear the tale in all its particulars soon enough. At the moment, it was sufficient to bask in the sight of Marlene the Jewess.

  “Feel free to call yourself whatever you choose,” I said. “I’ll need to expend some effort to believe it anyway.”

  “Can I light candles Friday night?”

  ***

  A week later I received the bill for my evening on the Psycho Path, a nasty number and an equally nasty reminder of my near-death experience after that triple dose of Little Rat Babies. The price for that rescue was extraordinarily higher than I’d imagined, but I had no means to judge these things.

  I had no clue how I was going to pay. I could opt to pay in time, but the amount of time would carry me well into my next lifetime. Momentarily, I considered conversion to Hinduism so as to depend on my reincarnated selves to pay the thing off, several lifetimes down the highway. Or I could sell overpriced cookies to my students. That would take several years, too, well past my retirement, I realized. Though considerably smaller, I also received the bill for Abe’s funeral. It seemed I’d purchased the deluxe package without my knowing i
t. More time on the reincarnation clock.

  “Quite a hefty sum, indeed,” said Maggie, Marlene with a yarmulke, tallit, phylacteries, and side locks, a convert experimenting with her new spiritual identity. A map of Israel formed the background, sometimes with the Territories, sometimes without. Maggie had lately been talking about immigrating, sometimes to Tel Aviv, sometimes to Ariel, that small city over the Green Line in what some believed was Palestinian territory. “It’s complicated,” she’d say.

  “Maybe I’ll see if Mortar needs a partner,” I said. “You and I could maximize our presence on social media, drum up some business for the Outtaluck, and make our fortune selling instant coffee and old cookies to refugees and tourists.”

  “Um, Nick,” she said, in an unmistakable tone of someone holding back a secret.

  “Um, yes, Maggie.”

  “Have you checked your bank balance lately?”

  I engaged in this frightening activity as infrequently as possible, and told her so.

  “But you know exactly when I check my balance, don’t you?” I said to her who knew my every digital footprint.

  “Well, of course, and I see you’ve checked your balance three times in the last seven months.” She giggled. “Let me suggest you have a look.”

  “I’d really rather not.”

  Maggie disappeared from the screen, and in large numerals my bank balance popped up before my eyes.

  My word!

  According to what was written on that page, my current balance exceeded by thirty million the piddling amount that should have been there. It took several long seconds for my stomach to return to its usual resting place.

  “Shmulie’s money, right?”

  “Some of his money. Most of it, and believe me when I tell you the most part, went to worthy charities, some supporting life in the VU. Universities and other research institutes engaged in finding the cure received large anonymous gifts. Since you seemed fond of Mortar, he received a gift on the proviso that he improve the menu. Shelley and I agreed to an amount that would keep him in Broadway regalia for a long time, though probably not enough to engineer a revival. I even gave a few dollars to Mingus. I imagine he’ll let it sit.” Mingus as Mingus had returned to the foyer. “And then there was you, dear.”