by George Foy
‘You know,’ PC said, peeling a package of frozen mussels and paella-flavoring and saffron-rice-mix and dumping them together in the paella-maker. ‘Listening to you guys. It makes me think. I mean I criticize people for having nothing new to say. But tonight – I was trying to talk to this girl. The one you saw going out, her name was, her name – it’ll come back to me. Anyway, I tried to think of something really new, really original to say. And I couldn’t. Who wants paella?’ he continued, keying commands into the Micronta. ‘It’ll be ready in 3.7 minutes.’
‘Speaking theoretically,’ the pilot asked Rocketman, ‘how would you go looking for this guy?’
‘Research,’ Rocketman said promptly.
*
‘Do you think my conversation is boring?’ PC asked, four minutes later, serving bowls of mushy yellow rice.
‘You ever listen to yourself?’ Rocketman asked him.
PC nodded.
‘It’s because,’ he explained, ‘all I really care about is meeting women, but I can hardly talk about that to a girl I’m trying to meet.’
‘Shhh,’ Rocketman said again, looking at the video screen where the anchorman had just switched live to Channel Five’s reporter.
‘This is Shaneesha Chaudhury,’ the reporter said, ‘coming at ya live from Central Park.’
Rocketman stared. The pilot thought Shaneesha looked even colder than her colleague at Bellevue. She wore a fluffy coat made of dead coyotes but her lips were purple and her eyes watered from the cold.
‘I am talking to you live from the Bell Atlantic Endangered Predators Exhibit at the Central Park Zoo,’ Shaneesha announced, ‘where sometime between the hours of 2:00 and 2:30 a.m., a person or persons opened a number of cages and let loose some of the most dangerous animals known to man to, uh, roam the streets of Manhattan.
‘With me now,’ Shaneesha continued, glancing to her left as the camera panned, ‘is Jim Burke of the City’s Park Service. Mr Burke, how many animals were let out of their cages?’
Jim looked like he had been forcibly dragged from the nearest pub. His nose was the shape and color of a huge strawberry. He had trouble focusing against the TV lights.
‘So we got, uh, three Alaskan timberwolves—’ he counted fingers ‘—two cheetahs, one male polar bear, and a – a wolverine.’
‘And do you have any idea where they are now?’
‘Well, we do have one report.’ Jim Burke looked dubious, but he continued anyway. ‘The polar bear’s s’posed to be at Wollmann Skating Rink. He scraped a hole in the ice and he’s, he’s just standin’ over it.’
‘I see.’ Shaneesha Chaudhury looked dubious herself. ‘And how much of a danger do these animals present to the people in the street?’
‘Well now.’ Jim thought about it. ‘I mean don’t get me wrong. These animals aren’t dangerous in the wild, ’cept maybe the bear – but after three–four years in a zoo they may not be feelin’ too rosy about members of the human race, know what I mean?’
‘Thank you, Mr Burke—’
‘—still.’ Jim had the spotlight now and did not want to relinquish it. The camera tried to pan away but he followed, keeping his red schnozz squarely in the center of the lens. ‘I mean, compared to most of the humans in Central Park this time of night – I mean, if I were you, Shaneesha, I’d be a lot more concerned about the safety of the wolves. Hnngh! Hnngh! Hnngh!’
Jim Burke was laughing.
‘Well, goddam,’ Rocketman said happily, still staring at the TV. ‘God-fuckin’-damn.’
‘Lobo?’ the pilot asked him.
‘Goddam Lobo,’ Rocketman agreed.
‘Fuckin’ ay,’ the pilot commented, ‘good fer him,’ and slugged the rest of his vodka.
PC was on his second bowl of paella. ‘I wish you guys wouldn’t talk in codes,’ he complained. ‘Who’s “Lobo”? And what about this guy you said – Hawkley.’ He laid out the last of the jisi in three tall cones, and did the first two himself.
‘I don’t know,’ the pilot said – and stopped in surprise. He hadn’t taken Rocketman’s suggestion seriously at first, hadn’t even treated the issue as real. But there it was, shaped and fully-formed, like an infant abandoned on the doorstep of his mind with a note pinned to its diaper reading ‘Please take care of this child.’
‘You’re thinking about it!’ Rocketman sounded as surprised as he. For no reason that surprise annoyed the pilot. The jis’ was wearing off – his emotions were skewed as a result, but there was nothing he could do about that.
‘Of course I’m thinking about it,’ the pilot said, crossly, ‘like you said, where else is there to go?’ And the guarantee of saying it out loud for the first time seemed to touch the raw hole in his gut that the loss of his friends had torn, and for the first time he had an idea why he might do this thing: because in the impossibility of truly helping his friends, he could do something for his memory of them. He could commit an act that meshed with Eltonjohn’s thirst for direction, and with the dignity of Roberto’s flight, and the logic in traffic that Obregon held so dear; and in so doing he would strike a blow for memory everywhere, for its role as the glue in patterns.
Of course this in itself would be a process of compensation, a mourning – eventually, perhaps, a cure – but that did not matter so much now.
An image of the silver-green cloud he had dived into off Long Island came unbidden into the pilot’s mind. It faded as uncontrollably as it had come, as if whatever was behind it had resolved its own tension, dissipated, and drifted like fog into the night.
*
PC sniffed mightily, and licked the rest of the crystal off the table.
‘Sara!’ he said.
‘What?’
‘That was her name – Sara. I want to come with you.’
‘You?’ Rocketman laughed out loud. The pilot stared at PC. PC glared at Rocketman, and blushed, but he repeated, gamely, ‘I said, I want to come with you.’
‘Why?’ the pilot asked, eventually.
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘Well I don’t know—’ he looked for reasons. ‘If we go, it wouldn’t be a joyride. It wouldn’t be, exactly, romantic. There’s not gonna be any chicks.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘We could end up dead. Or worse.’
‘You don’t understand, do you?’ PC got up and left the kitchen.
God, suffering from acute tsampa overdose, made rodent barfing sounds in the corner.
PC came back a minute later with a wad of transparent sheet plastic the size of a small beach ball.
‘Look at this,’ he said grimly.
‘What is it?’ Rocketman asked.
‘LayWrap,’ the pilot said, and started to giggle. ‘Safe sex. Real safe sex. Shit, I never seen so much safe sex in one place in my whole life!’
‘But that’s it,’ PC burst out. ‘That’s exactly it. Safe. It’s the safety! That’s what’s wrong. With my job. With the waltz-moshes. With the women here. They’re all totally available, and totally protected, and totally safe. It’s all so fucking boring it makes me want to die!’
PC stood in the middle of his kitchen, both hands buried in the sticky plastic. Tears formed in his eyes, rolled down his nose and cheeks, and fell audibly on the plastic.
‘It can be just as boring, to be in Oakdale,’ the pilot said softly.
‘Maybe not for him,’ Rocketman commented, and shrugged.
The pilot watched his friend sniffle. ‘God, Rocketman,’ he said softly. ‘What’s wrong with us? We got a civilization that throws good people like Roberto and Obregon into living hell on one hand. Then, on the other, we got perfectly normal, decent people like Fred here who have everything anybody could want and they still bawl their eyes out ’cause they’re so bored. What is wrong with us, man?’
‘Aaah,’ Rocketman said, looking at one of the six-foot tomatoes on the wall. ‘We are failed spacemen. That’s what’s wrong.
‘You see, they promised us freedom from th
is planet we’d poisoned. “Look,” they said, “here is the moon. Tomorrow we’ll give you Mars. Can the rest be far behind?” And we believed them, deep down where we make up the stories about our own lives. We believed in the films they made to convince us. Star Wars, Outland, Silent Running, 2001. In our minds we waltzed in space, aah, the “Blue Danube” rolling forever in all directions, man. We commanded starships. We sought out new life and new civilizations. We made friends with pointy-eared critters who somehow all spoke English. We boldly split infinitives where no infinitives had been split before . . .’
Rocketman put a cigarette in his mouth. He lit three matches. All three sputtered out in his shaking fingers. He took the cigarette out of his mouth.
‘But it was all bullshit, brother. It was all so much pablum to keep our minds occupied. They weren’t interested in space; what they wanted was our UCC accounts. And so our rockets blew up. Our rockets always blow up. The only ones that work are the ones with MIRVs, and kinetic-kill warheads, and high-resolution digital spy cameras. And now we’re stuck in limbo. We’ve lost the earth, and we can’t reach anything else.’ He looked at the three dead matches in his right hand.
‘Wouldn’t you be unhappy?’ he finished quietly.
Chapter Twenty
‘I dislike sedentaries of the heart. Those who trade nothing become nothing.’
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Citadelle
So, with little fanfare and less planning, Rocketman, the pilot, and to a lesser extent PC, began their search for Hawkley.
The pilot started in a roundabout fashion from a payphone on West End Avenue.
First he put in a call to Fat Chico Fong. When the machine answered, he told it he was fixing up a fourth-hand Learjet in New Mexico, and the repairs were taking longer than planned, but he’d be ready in three weeks’ time.
There, he thought hopefully, depressing the cradle. That should keep the tai-lo’s red-sticks off his ass till he made the free run he’d promised.
Then, swiping the UCC-card again, he called an attorney to arrange for what help the law would allow Roberto and Obregon.
The lawyer, Jack Botelho, was a Portuguese-American from New Bedford. He made a living defending smugglers. He spoke in guarded tones.
He told the pilot that under the provisions of the new Anti-Gang And Terrorist Environment amendments to the reenabled McCarran-Williams Act – popularly known as the AGATE law – he could do no more for anyone caught running illicit cargo than he could for a suspected terrorist. All were deprived of the right of habeas corpus by the Act; Obregon came under the AGATE purview by his mere association with the pilot as well as a tie-in through the ancient Racketeering, Influence, and Corrupt Organizations statute. Botelho’s voice turned studiously casual. Did the pilot not want to retain a lawyer for himself, he asked, since he was being indicted in absentia by an AGATE grand jury?
‘What for?’ the pilot asked, taking off his aviator’s glasses as if to see the question better.
‘Illegal traffic in unlicensed and restricted equipment of significant value to national security,’ Jack Botelho replied, ‘aka running pirated organic microchips, which is always a bad idea, seeing how much dough TransCom’s PACs put into the Christian-Republicans last election.’
The pilot switched to another booth to continue the call. He arranged to pay the lawyer, in King Fook wafers, by registered mail, for representing Roberto and Obregon.
And he asked Botelho if he had ever seen or talked to Hawkley, the author of the Smuggler’s Bible, or knew anyone who had. But the lawyer just laughed.
‘Does he even exist, that you know of?’ the pilot insisted.
‘Put it this way,’ Botelho replied. ‘There’s a lot of smoke. Bound to be a flame somewhere. But the fire I’d worry about is under your own ass. You sure you don’t want to turn yourself in? I can maybe cut a deal, at this stage.’
After he hung up the pilot put his dark glasses back on. His scarf was wound over his chin and the collar of his denim jacket was pulled up to his ears. He opened the ECM-pak on the tipped shelf of the booth, pulled out the headphones, and switched the scanner to city range. He fitted the earphones, slung the ECM on one shoulder, and walked away from the payphone, listening to cop traffic, looking carefully down the avenue to see if he was being tailed.
The feeling of being chased was nothing new. The edge in every move, the tingle in every cell that came from playing rabbit in a game of foxes was something he had grown used to. Possibly he had even got addicted to it over the years. Always he’d associated that edge with voyage, the tension between foreign and domestic.
Yet for some reason it did not feel out of place on his home turf. Always he’d had the gut-awareness it would come to this someday, over and above the logic and probabilities. Always he’d known that the borders at a country’s edges were only an expression of a border in its heart. He’d read the famous Smuggler’s Bible chapters where Hawkley, or whoever wrote the book, described the way large organizations became actual life forms; he knew, in theory, this was expressed in bureaucratic terms by the hoarding, distorting, and cutting off of information. But the awareness the pilot had was less abstract and more personal. The Bible talked grandly about how organizations thought and behaved, ate and drank by closing and shutting and building borders around everything and anyone worth having, but he had seen how they worked firsthand, in the immigration officials who interviewed them in his childhood, with their endless forms and books of quotas and lists of demands they could not meet. He’d seen it in the state officials who tried to tell his father he could not live on the farm he had bought with his own money; he’d seen it in the regulations they slapped on superboat racers and fliers and people who only wanted to go fast and not deal with rules.
He had chosen to make a living hauling illegal cargo across international boundaries, but he knew that if he was committed to crossing the borders outside the country, sooner or later, one way or the other, he would cross the line inside as well, until he himself became the expression of the trade he plied – he himself became the controlled substance, the black market goods, the contraband, the ‘unlicensed and restricted equipment.’ And then it was himself he’d have to smuggle, in and out of his own country, his own city, his own life, simply in order to give that life expression.
Twice on the ECM the pilot heard his name mentioned on police channels. ‘Marak, Mike Alpha Romeo Alpha Kilo, we got a suspect matches that description, stand by,’ and then the stoic negatives as other evidence came in, as the faxed sheets failed to check out.
The pilot took the 7 train back to the Schweik Society to pick up the Chevy, and his chartcase. Hearing his name on the scanner made him feel kind of fluttery. In the yellow pages he found a magic store on Queens Boulevard, where he bought a kid’s disguise kit from a fat Punjabi lady. In a Genovese drugstore he purchased a pair of large cheap sunglasses. The moustache-glue itched, and overall the result made him look like an Atlantic City hustler, but at least it didn’t resemble him much.
He fine-tuned the ECM, focusing on BON frequencies, and drove across the Queensboro to West 57th Street.
The tall white building with the car dealership on the ground floor looked exactly the same; not good, not evil. There was nothing to indicate the BON traffic center for the Northeast was set up on its eighteenth floor. The pilot drove around for a while, checking the vans parked nearby because one or more of them almost certainly was a BON surveillance or RDF vehicle. He noted the tags, the logos – 7 Brothers TV and Appliance, Summa Equipment Rental, Speedy Lock and Door, Orkin Pest Control. Scanner traffic was heavy. The BON dispatcher, a woman, had a light, pleasant voice but he could not tell what she was talking about because she spoke in code only. The code was a random polynomial generated by Fujitsu-Crays in a basement in Fort Meade and there was no known way to break it.
He hated being worried with nothing specific to do. He drove around the BON building, then got nervous about being spotted
by security cameras or UAVs. He decided to look up Gene Gahagan. Getting onto the Trump-Venezia/Riverside Highway he segued onto 9-N, switched to 487, then the Hutchinson. Fairly certain he wasn’t being tailed at this point, he got off the highway system in Rye, New York.
Going to see Gene Gahagan reminded him of how the Smuggler’s Bible defined the different kinds of smugglers.
‘There are three kinds of freetraders,’ the Smuggler’s Bible says. ‘There are hardass dudes who do it strictly for long green. There are the romantics, the cats that do it for emotional, intellectual, or political kicks. In Darkworld – what used to be called the Third or Fourth Worlds – there are societies like the Pashtu, the Karayar, or the Hakka, whose members are freetraders in the most right-on sense because the tribes they belong to simply are not down with the idea of nation-states, let alone borders or Customs.
‘Generally speaking,’ the Smuggler’s Bible continues, ‘the Romantics are sloppy. They rap too much, they won’t carry cargo they don’t dig. They dress hip and get attached to their tool of transport, pay in gold because they like the feel of it, and drive fast wheels . . . The hardasses, on the other hand, treat smuggling like any other lunch-boxin’, capitalist business. They look exactly like every other dude in straight society. In the US they use a UCC and go to Disney World with the kids. They live in suburban homes, pay taxes, punch clocks, drive a Saturn. They dress like lawyers and talk like accountants . . .’
Gene Gahagan, the pilot knew, was the very model of the Hardass. He lived in a modern three-bedroom ranch house off Rye Beach Road. He drove a leased Oldsmobile. He owned a small taco franchise and dressed in three-hundred-dollar suits. Once every ten weeks or so he traveled to Georgia under an assumed name, leased an anonymous single-engine plane, flew it to the Cockpit Country and ran back five hundred pounds of pressed Jamaican weed to one of a series of small strips in the South.
Gahagan ran the black side of his business like a CIA operation. He worked out of the office of his taco franchise. Like everyone else in the Trade he listened to Federal frequencies on his scanner.