by George Foy
The ’nets were not as real to him anymore, he realized; their abstract topography had been thinned by the intense effort of concrete places and steel frontiers.
In the same way, he reflected, his former neurotic care for cyber-security was diluted in him by the solidity of a threat that could cause immediate damage – actual trauma of torn tissue and shattered bone – in Breslau, in the Northwest Frontier.
And that brought to mind Fat Chico Fong.
Now there was a threat of steel and fire or, more accurately, of sawed-off shotguns and Number 45. Chico must have seen through the New Mexico smokescreen by now, and he had to be pretty upset about being fronted off.
The pilot shivered again, thinking of the gray sludge of pork chow mein, Habana-style.
But while Chico had known of Carmelita, he had no skinny on PC. So they were safe in this apartment, as long as they stayed away from the haunts and old connections of their previous lives. In this one case, doing nothing was safer than action. And that was fine by him, for he was still deeply tired from the trip, and it seemed like a perfect situation when the option that led to more security was what your body wanted to do anyway.
*
Rocketman, on the other hand, was more concerned about their safety than before.
Specifically, he was terribly worried about the security in PC’s building. He spent hours at the Micronta, watching Securicam monitors, hitting keys to change views, from black-and-white scalps and hats (downward shot) of people riding the elevators, to guests at the main doors, to deliverymen at the service entrance. He went out at random intervals, at all hours to check for Sour Lake Roustabouts or Bilderberg agents skulking down the adjoining streets. Sometimes he walked east and south to 35th Street to check if they were waiting for him at the Bellevue entrances as well.
On these visits he loitered across the street from the hospital, gazing up at the mental health tower where he used to live.
For all these missions he disguised himself in PC’s clothes. Although the Safe People who lived in the building could not look at him without a twinge of anxiety, the building’s doormen got used to the sight of a large, almond-colored man, with sad eyes and a worried frown, sloping in and out of the front door dressed in fashionable camel’s hair chesterfields, worsted trousers, monkey jackets, and gaucho boots, everything two sizes too small.
The pilot, most of the time, wore nothing at all, or almost nothing. He had got used to walking around in underwear in the Flying Boat. He had decided clothes were psychologically as well as physically restraining. He thought better when he wore fewer clothes. When he went out for walks, he put on the minimum; a pair of jeans, his travel jacket, boots. He never wore glasses, or the fake moustache he’d bought after his apartment was busted. He took a scarf to wrap around his chin in case a cruiser went by. Nothing else. No socks, or underwear, or shirt.
He spent a lot of time walking, shivering, and thinking. He roamed Riverside Park, tramping the wild kudzu down as far as Television City, up to the latitude of Grant’s Tomb, moving hard to keep warm in the eternal gray wind reaming the Hudson Valley. He sat out of the wind’s pointed vector in the shelter of the Civil War carronades by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial, watching the hedgehogs as they chewed at brake linings and sipped the sweet pink fluid, or the raccoons as they dug pitfalls to trap the marrauding coyote. Eating whole packages of extra-rich Brownie Chocolate Nut cookies. These, he had decided, were better than Double-Dark-Chocolate Milanos, or even the chocolate Chesapeakes.
He came to think of the Riverside statues as friends, and counselors. The grieving half-dressed widows and children of the Firemen’s Monument on 100th Street; the two mounted soldiers – Joan of Arc, armored for winter on 93rd, and Franz Sigel, still musing over his military screwups on 105th – Sam Tilden, the also-ran of 110th Street; Louis Kossuth, the Magyar nationalist of 111th, sword ever unsheathed as a precautionary measure against the timeless treachery of Habsburgs; all seemed to have acquired human attributes by virtue of the character traits they shared with the pilot.
All of them were losers; Joan of Arc burned alive at Rouen, Kossuth in exile, Sigel a laughingstock, Tilden trounced by Hayes; but there was more to it than that.
Alone these forgotten statues held the line against the tazer-muggers, the pigeon shit, the tee-dees, and the eternal vicious wind off the river. It was that sense of last stand, ‘The guard dies but surrenders not,’ that brought out the empathy in the pilot, had him slapping their cold plinths affectionately as he passed beside; for solitude made them allies, all of them together in their hopeless defense against the cold that blew in from New Jersey, with its impossibly gaudy sunsets, its bitter rain, its taint of roasted coffee.
He got to know more than the statues. As the days wore on he became familiar with the ships that plodded up and down the river, the vessels that accomplished the day-to-day, bread-and-butter, intide out-tide business of the decaying harbor. He favored the utility boats – tiny harbor tankers like the Jean Frank or the Northern Sun. He admired them without reservation as they scuttled up and down the filthy water, churning stubbornly into head currents, coated with ice, grimed with diesel oil, stained with rust, heavy with the fuel that ran everything from boilers to trucks to the generators powering the subways.
He was fond of the tugs. He liked to watch them at night, reading their lights like port-pidgin; the two vertical white mast lights denoting barges being pushed; the three lights indicating long tows; the red of flammable cargo, the blinking yellow at the barges’ forward end gamely fighting the glare of a huge neon sign newly erected on the Palisades side. ‘http://www.fix4god’ the sign flashed, pink-red e-mail to Hoffa’s heaven. Over the words, disembodied against the orange light-pollution, hung a neon likeness of the prophet himself – pudgy nose, acid-eaten jowls, hand raised in pistol fashion, pointing at Manhattan.
He got to know the tugs during the day by the colors of their deckhouses, and their shapes. The Buchanan 42 he recognized by her blue paint and flat riverboat bow; the Mister Alan, by her squat shape and her red-and-white trim; the Ginni Reinauer by her buff funnel. He could distinguish between the Gulf Star, the Kate, the Mary DeFelice, with their various loads of bunker-C or garbage, or crushed Adirondack stone, or twisted scrap metal from the Bronx and Bridgeport heaps.
Now, walking and watching the river traffic, he understood what had drawn Obregon to the traffic of the streets. If you became familiar with the patterns of traffic, you began to sense an underlying logic, a residual order, a general structure above and beyond the particular, as if this human expression of chaos were subject to the same laws of harmonics and period-doubling as more foreign agents like weather, or the boiling of water. The cargo of tugs and barges affected so many different levels of the city’s life that their coincidences and delays had to have a ripple effect on both sides of their individual journeys. And that ripple must spread outward, in the movement of generators, of credit, of people, till eventually it came full circle and caused the tugs and tankers to change behavior, with downstream effects on future cargoes. And so forth.
He even fantasized that some Cargo cult – some version of the beliefs of the Watap on Pulau Karang – might one day spring up around the harbor of New York. Acolytes of tides and fuel slicks, witch doctors of subways and bus lines, they would plot schedules, delays, early arrivals. Clustering around VHFs, cellphones, and CB radios, they would light communion flares at altars loaded with add-a-ride transfers and busts of Robert Moses. They would set up fake fuel terminals and commuter stops to influence the patterns that went beyond pattern, hoping one day to achieve some kind of hold on a structure whose mystery and omnipresence they could guess at but seldom grasp and never, under normal circumstances, affect.
But the pilot was careful not to let these thoughts get out of hand, even when he was casting around for something to dwell on besides Ela. He did not let himself become concerned, as Obregon had, about cars. Nor did he note the passing of traff
ic helicopters over the Henry Hudson Drive at rush hour, or the UAVs that flitted over Washington Heights, searching with VR-envirocams for the safe houses of Rwandan crack bosses. He ignored the choppers that went up and down the valley, ferrying Pentagon suits to northern bases, or flying the mayor and his Omega cronies to country estates in the Catskills.
*
Another factor besides walking and thinking was important in reestablishing a connection between the pilot and New York – for that connection was still tenuous, made marginal by the travel- and stress-induced fancy that his real self actually had stayed behind in Asian mountains or a South China Sea lagoon and New York itself was simply a bubble in the mind, a syndrome of disease, of brain-inflammation, something to be ascribed to malaria, or clawless lobsters, and dispelled by the appropriate medication and a good night’s sleep.
That factor was TV.
The pilot took to coming back from his walks, removing his clothes, and sliding into bed beside Ela. He would wrap himself in what blankets were left and strap on the second of the paired shutter-goggles. He was conscious only for a short time of how lonely they must look, two living creatures with their heads mostly covered by plastic masks, together but not touching; staring at a seven-foot screen that sparkled with standby charge yet made no noise. Watching whatever Ela selected.
Entertainment and news, mostly, to the extent you could separate the two. He learned immediately of the latest in terror bombings, the Safeway atrocity in Brentwood (forty-three dead) and the sabotage of the Glen Ridge Canyon dam (casualties: a rancher, a tourist, and 437 cattle). He was fully aware of where the Truth Trust team, featuring Amy Dillon, stood in its quest to stamp out violent music pirates in Rio on the new VR serial, Real Life. He found out to the ounce the size of Brooke Denali’s fibroid tumor (removed while he was away). He had at his fingertips all the facts about the latest ATM hostage-takings, as well as about the restaurant (Tariq’s Spa, Laurel Canyon) where Jason Rock, who played Chase MacBride on Pain in the Afternoon, had thrown a waltz-mosh for his prenuptial.
When there was straight news, as Hawkley indicated, it barely touched on the continuing node-rebellion in Cartagena. In fact, the only mention of nodes was on the Entertainment/Fashion network, which aired a piece on calico kerchiefs, first worn in the Manila node, that were becoming popular in areas of Marina del Rey.
Once, as a feel-good kicker to an otherwise blood-soaked half-hour, XTV’s Ned Reynolds aired a special segment on the mutating marsh on the western shore of Narragansett Bay.
‘The federal government has declared a national security lockdown on this unglamorous piece of waterfront real estate,’ Reynolds intoned. Over his head, Kiowas stuttered. A Predator UAV swooped dizzyingly near – so close that, sitting on their bed 150 miles away in full 3-D immersion, the pilot and Ela both ducked, knocking their heads painfully together.
The XTV camera panned. From overhead, they could make out splotches of spinach green spreading tendrils like mold around the cattails, the rusted piles of trash. The pilot extended his hand, the cattails looked so close, so real; he wanted to part the rushes to look for the swept-back crucifix shape of his Citation. But he did not see it. He saw no Jumpers, either. Only armed men in bodysuits with ‘BON Piracy Task Force’ across the back, rolling razor ribbon across access roads.
‘Increasingly aggressive in its efforts to punish intellectual piracy, the Bureau of Nationalizations has cordoned off the entire former naval base against amateur chip-growers. At the same time it has committed more resources to finding out how the organic microchips got here in the first place.’
The cameras flicked back to Ned Reynolds. He had changed his haircut again, the pilot thought, turning up the volume on his face-sucker.
‘But this may be a case of shutting the stable door,’ the anchorman said, squinting to telegraph the building of tension. ‘TransCom scientists have isolated strange attractors, repetitive patterns of energy flow, arising from background transmissions in a marsh sixteen miles away from here, near Fall River, Massachusetts. And these strange attractors exactly mimic the transmission patterns of this marsh in Rhode Island.’ Reynolds leaned forward for the kicker.
‘The organo-chips are moving, scientists believe, communicating as they move; and if this is the case, all the razor wire in the world will not stop them from spreading, taking root, and multiplying, wherever the tide floats them. And now this message.’
‘TransCom must be really pissed,’ the pilot remarked, in some awe at what he’d done.
‘Shhh,’ Ela hissed. Already she was engrossed in a commercial featuring Brooke Denali, from Pain, selling rectal deodorant. ‘Flatter your fanny,’ Brooke whispered as men with no definite sexual orientation pulled lace in waves over her buttocks. Brooke Denali was Ela’s favourite TV star. After ‘The News with Ned Reynolds’ she flipped right back to a special season premiere of Pain in the Afternoon.
‘That’s what’s-his-name, isn’t it?’ the pilot said, peeking out from under the face-sucker to steal some of her popcorn. ‘The guy who just got engaged, in real life, he’s really rich on the show?’
‘Jason Rock.’
‘And Brooke Denali’s his wife?’
‘Yeah. But she lost her memory. Some Japanese guys tried to steal her dog-video and locked her in the fridge, and the loss of oxygen caused amnesia. Now she’s hooked up with an Adornista cell that wants to kill Chase MacBride, ’cause he’s gonna turn Baja California into a whale theme park, which would be really good for Mexico ’cause of their unemployment, but she has no idea he’s her husband.’
‘And him?’
‘Oh, he’s Thorn Savage,’ Ela continued, popping a new can of Zero Cola. ‘He’s the son of MacBride’s biggest enemy. He just got elected Congressman, and he’s got the hots for Simone, who’s MacBride’s illegitimate daughter, but no one knows that; he’s about to ruin MacBride Software ’cause he knows that Chase’s father bribed someone for their licensing rights, way back when.’
God scampered into the room in his freeze-bolt-freeze rhythm. The rat was still elated with all the possibilities of this apartment, after the confines of cages, and planes, and hotels. He sniffed around the skirts of the bed and touched the pilot’s bare foot, hanging off the edge. The pilot lifted him onto the covers. The rat snuggled his way into the nest of sheets, searching for popcorn.
‘That’s their daughter?’ the pilot asked, happy to talk to Ela about anything, even soap operas. ‘Chase’s wife’s daughter, I mean.’
‘Jessica. That’s right. She just slept with a rollerblader in a green face-sucker, who I think is one of the Adornistas. She’s suing Grant, Chase’s son, because of a car accident – but I kinda think she’s falling for him. Of course he doesn’t know she’s pregnant, because of the rollerblader.’
‘So she’s gonna fall down the stairs, right?’
Ela hesitated.
‘What do you mean?’
Her voice was suddenly devoid of relief.
‘It’s what always happens, on Pain. When someone gets pregnant.’
The bed rocked as Ela sat up from her pillows.
‘You don’t have to get so sarcastic. There’s nothing wrong with Pain.’
‘I din’ say anything.’
The pilot lifted off his goggles and saw, as his vision adjusted to the gloomy room, that he had exactly mimicked the timing and nature of Ela’s movements.
‘It’s your voice. I can tell. You think it’s trash.’ Ela noticed God, and her face screwed up. She dropped the shutter-goggles among the sheets, and threw her half-full can of cola at the bedroom door.
‘I don’t think it’s trash. I don’t—’ the pilot struggled to remain neutral ‘— I don’t think it’s anything. It’s like Zero Cola. It’s like anesthetic. There’s nothing to feel.’
Ela rolled over, away from him, into the popcorn bowl.
The pilot bit down on the defense, and the resulting anger.
‘I can’t help how it affects me, Ela
. It just seems so – distant. Pain. Even the news. It’s as if the real world didn’t exist.’
‘You’re just making speeches.’ She stuffed popcorn in her mouth, and licked at the dripping butter.
The elastic shock of a bomb blast gently rattled the windows.
He pushed one fist into another, trying to define exactly what he meant. ‘It’s not that people don’t die, or kill, or have babies. On interactive TV, just like in the real world. But somehow here, well the 3-D is too good. It’s as if we need clumsiness, and poor resolution to understand things. We need to make an effort so our brains can feel. On Pain, on the news, we get sex, death, luxury, a little social message in eight minutes before the commercial, so we don’t have to work. We don’t have to, well, look for anything. It makes everybody passive, on either side of the camera. And that’s the definition of dead. Because we don’t feel hard anymore, or understand, which is the same thing. Feeling too hard gets in the way of buying rectal deodorant. See, if we understood something we might be less worried about earwax odor. But we’re all dead, and TV’s there to help us forget we aren’t living anymore.’
He tickled God’s stomach, to take some of the weight from this discussion. But ever since the trip the rat had refused to do tricks. He just burrowed deeper into the sheets.
‘That should be just about perfect for you, then,’ Ela remarked, from under a butter-coated pillow. ‘Seems to me you’ve spent your life hanging out with the dead. Your brother. Your friend, in the islands.’
The pilot got off the bed. He located his vodka flask and topped it up from PC’s liquor cabinet. He put on pants, boots, his travel jacket and went out for a walk. Ela’s words stayed with him. The image that had surged unbidden into his mind while talking with her also remained; the memory of Greenwood Cemetery, and the constant buzz of electronic voices rising ghostly from underground, where the dead watched TV.