Where Moth and Rust Destroy
One of the men was older, early-sixties perhaps, ex-FBI, so fit that when he wore polo shirts, which he usually did, people performed double-takes trying to match his rippling biceps and high, firm chest with his tired, slack-lidded eyes and softening jowls. The other man wasn’t old, but certainly wasn’t young at heart. He worked security for big events at arenas—guarding self-help gurus and day-trading mavens and preteen pop stars who staged highly choreographed concerts in order to put clips of the concerts on the internet.
These men had for years frequented the same diner for breakfast, each always alone, each idly noticing the other’s presence like they always noticed anyone in any room, but they had never spoken until they’d found themselves grouped into the same search party, looking for a small boy who hadn’t made it home from his bus stop. Had the boy never been found, or been found dead, they likely never would’ve spoken again, but the boy had been discovered alive, and by their party specifically, abandoned in a warehouse of rusted farm equipment by some halfwit asshole who’d thought better of whatever evil he’d had planned. It was a miracle to be sure, a joyous occasion, slaps on the back and wet eyes, and for the older man, later that night, the solitary opening of a twenty-year-aged bottle of Scotch, but even so, despite the feelings of celebration and relief, both men (and most everyone else involved) understood what a ruined, bankrupt world it was when this was all one could hope for in the miracle department—a depraved sicko losing the courage to pursue his dream.
The next time they were both at the diner, the older man waved the younger over. They each gave the waitress the same order, an omelet with wheat toast, though the older man took grapefruit juice and the younger orange. Black coffees. Mirrored ramrod posture. They talked about, for one thing, being divorced. The older man had enough perspective to know that the only way a marriage worked was if both people were willing to be unhappy much of the time, were willing to prioritize preserving the union over daily enjoyment—he actually admired people with the grit to pull it off. The younger man was still bitter. His ex-wife had been carrying on affairs through her device, seven or eight of them, without ever meeting the other men in person, and she hadn’t understood, since she wasn’t actually physically engaging with anyone else, why that was so bad. That was the part that galled him, her lack of guilt. She had assured him that he was a much more significant part of her personal journey than those other guys, and was dumbfounded that he wanted to split up. That was two years ago, but the younger man still felt unresolved, still felt he was owed an apology. As far as the future, he thought he might not mind getting remarried one day, maybe to a divorced woman whose husband had treated her badly, who’d belittled her and gambled away all the money, but he didn’t really expect to meet anyone and didn’t make any effort to. The two men talked about the weather, the freak snowstorms and extended droughts. They talked about how striking cars used to be, like works of art. They cut their omelets neatly with their forks, every bite the same size, and dabbed their mouths with the wispy white napkins. When their checks appeared, both covered his own cursive-scribbled green slip with a sharp-cornered little stack of cash bills, each enjoying the feel of the paper money in his fingers. Neither rose to leave. Each found out, as they talked on, that the other wasn’t much into sports anymore, although each had his own customized exercise routine, the older man’s involving uphill jogs in weighted vests, the younger man’s centered on swimming back and forth across the Winkton Reservoir. They both had perfect vision, the older man’s better than perfect. They’d both worked on ranches as teenagers. They had agreed, before parting ways that morning, that they both favored this particular diner because it had real waitresses you could speak to rather than easy-screens. It was the only place around that took cash. It was the only place where everyone in sight wasn’t staring at their device. The men agreed that even though from the outside the diner looked like every building looked nowadays—dull white, plasticky, aggressively sanitized, vaguely Scandinavian if Scandinavians had run out of wood—that on the inside the diner was a true place with its own living blood, its own unbleached if out-of-step spirit.
Right now the men were hundreds of miles from the diner. Right now they were driving through quiet hill-country suburbs in a sand-colored van they’d gone in on together and used only for jobs, headed for a ritzy enclave of Austin, registering without turning their heads—because each man’s work had trained him to register anything and everything that crossed his visual field—the strings of drab, interchangeable shopping centers they passed. There were venture-hubs where people put on headgear and strapped into a module and skydived or ran with bulls or had sex or got into fistfights or ate cakes as big as golf carts. There were Tibetan fast food joints. Shame rehabilitation facilities. Shame avoidance facilities. Nail shops—those hadn’t changed, or not that the men knew of. It was almost the dinner hour, and a line of homeless people waited outside a shop that sold gourmet, organic pet treats, hoping for overstock, hoping for items that had gone stale, for items that had come out irregular or been dropped on the floor.
“What you don’t know is that she can’t read,” the older man said. “Book might as well be a doorstop to her. A stepstool.” He was steering the big Chevy with a single steady thumb, watching the street signs as they loomed up one by one. He’d memorized the directions to the hotel, like always. “They ushered her right through high school with B’s even though she was there half the time. Gave a big donation to the school’s my understanding. My daughter got her this gizmo—scans the words on a page and reads them out loud. Even with that, she never did a lick of homework.”
“I knew a blind dude had one of those. He was way into nutrition. Used it to read labels—the calories and vitamins and, you know, riboflavin.”
“She ain’t blind. There’s nothing wrong with her eyes. There’s nothing wrong with her that her mama didn’t cause.”
The younger man knew all about the older man’s granddaughter. Most people did. She had a DatDere franchise. When she plucked her eyebrows, the tweezer company paid her. When she painted her nails, the polish company paid her. She did little two-move dances on Singsong and the record company paid her.
“Haven’t spoke in three years,” the older man said. “I didn’t want to be seen on that…show or whatever it is. I didn’t want to condone that. I had to wait till she had a day off, a ‘mental stability day’ is what she called it. This was the last time I laid in-person eyes on her. I wanted to take her riding, but she said it was cruel to sit on the horse’s back.”
“What does she weigh, eighty-five pounds?” the younger man said. Now that they were on slower roads, he cranked open his window. The crank windows had been one of the reasons they’d chosen this van. In the older man’s garage, they’d printed big stickers they could slap on the side so they’d look like window guys. Wink-Wink Windows, with shiny blue lettering and little asterisk-type stars floating around the words that indicated crystal clarity. They had a sticker to be pool guys with basically the same design. Another to be plumbers.
“I tried to tell her about her family history, and she thought World War I was the one with the Nazis. She thought the Korean War was the U.S. against Korea, like it’s all one country and we attacked it.”
“Well, she’s a leading authority on tanning cream and lipstick, and she’s filthy rich.”
“Yeah, she’s filthy rich and her mama’s along for the ride. That’s why she never said anything about school. When I mentioned the reading to her, to my daughter, she starts saying she’s not gonna shame Erica about it. She says I’m sowing shame, that I’m perpetuating a shame cycle. Like I’m the one who put her on that damn fool website when she was nine years old.”
“Ha,” the younger man said. “Damn fool. I like that. I’m gonna start saying that.”
“I’m not ashamed of anything. If there’s a cycle, it starts with her.” The older man eased the van into a turning lane and onto a smaller street, and then they began crossing well-shaded roads named for oldies bands: Blind Melon Drive, Soundgarden Court, Jane’s Addiction Avenue. “When my daughter started in with the pills, it was the same thing. I flushed them down the toilet, and she said that’s a shamer’s way to deal with the problem. She said I wasn’t a trained professional and had no empathy. She said I was roadblocking her personal journey. Now she just goes to rehab every six months and then starts over, starts taking them again. I honestly think it’s for the show—or the, whatever you call it. I think they want her to keep relapsing.”
“Personal journey,” the younger man said, a little sadly. “They all do got a personal journey, don’t they?”
The older man turned on the headlights by pulling out a knob, but almost immediately they sighted the hotel. It was an eggshell color, its walls big clean panels separated by thin black seams, like a building made of enormous children’s blocks. The whole edifice was illuminated evenly and opaquely from within. hotel 4 – west band, austin was stenciled on one of the panels.
“I don’t read as much as I should,” the younger man said. “I like Texas history, but there’s only so much Texas history; they stopped making it a while back. I read old movie scripts sometimes. Chevy Chase movies. They’re only funny if you imagine him saying it.”
“I bet I’ve read a thousand books,” said the older man. He didn’t seem proud of it, just stating a fact. “Half of them were detective novels. When I was young.”
“Yeah, I like those. I like the ones with honest cops in them. For some reason.”
“They’re considered light reading, but they were important too. They sort of taught me how to act, certain ones of them. How to be professional and, you know, decent. Me and I think plenty of other guys my age.”
“Raised by writers,” the younger man said. “Doesn’t sound too promising.”
The older man pulled past the hotel to the next lot down, which fronted a store that sold outdoor stereo equipment, and parked under a trimmed mesquite tree. They wouldn’t have to see anyone to check in. They’d just type a code—which the older man had memorized—into the key-maker and then carry their leather satchels right to their rooms. They considered this ironic, the cold electronic tentacles of technology aiding them in their missions. “No, it don’t sound too promising,” the older man said, “but on the other hand, these kids today—sweet Jesus, what’s teaching those poor souls how to act?”
***
It was dusk in the moneyed inner belts of Dallas. (m)E^scorchô was nestled high in the purplish heavens, near the top of a towering newish condo building that looked out at the top floors of other newish condo buildings. There were no stars above, even if she’d been looking for them, but down below were a million points of light from old-growth office buildings, governments buildings, from the churches, steepled and unsteepled, that had once held so much sway in the city. E had just finished her eleven-element smoothie and was reclining on one angled section of a sprawling cream-colored couch, listening to her DatDere pallaborator, Hadley Rice, pitch the following idea: that E would partner with a certain highly seasoned follow DatDere artist—this artist, whose name was Selma!!!, having gained four million fanciers in the past three weeks—and that the two of them, supporting one another as women and bonding throughout their evolutions, would together learn to read. They would embrace a challenge, Hadley said, ticking this off with her pinkie. They would bridge a generation gap, or, like, several of them, she said, ticking her ring finger. They would—middle finger—overcome divides born of race variance and of their differing upbringings. E had been resistant to the idea—it was best policy to be resistant at first—but as usual Hadley was talking her into it. Hadley had become her closest friend, one of her only friends—well, besides Cassius, if a boyfriend was really a friend. The public favor ceiling was sky high on this, Hadley explained, her voice becoming calmer and yet rising an octave—inspiring unprivileged youths, lessening shame for seasoned non-readers. On top of that, revealing a surprise, an aspect of E that no one knew, a disadvantage she’d been overcoming all along in secret. After the hard work, once both she and Selma!!! were former non-readers, they’d do a tandem performance. They could serialize it—like, a chapter a night. Something feminist. Something where really incredible things and really horrible things happened to women.
“You don’t think it’s boring?” E said. “Or, I don’t know, last century?”
“There are still a lot of people who were born last century,” said Hadley. “What it does is humanize you. When you’re as gorgeous as you are and you literally live above everyone, it can be good to show some…well, something you haven’t yet mastered.”
“We’re sitting there learning, like, sight words? That’s good content?”
“Oh, the actual lessons will barely be a part of it. We’ll do a couple vulnerable moments, a couple breakthroughs. It’ll be you and Selma!!! getting to know each other, basically—doing what you do, being yourselves. You’re different in every way except that you’re both confident, successful women.”
“Who’s she bringing, exactly?” E asked. She sat upright and positioned her device so she and Hadley could see one another better. Hadley saw E’s fetching, thick-lashed eyes and rosy cheeks. E saw a skinny woman in a silver-grass pantsuit eating air-fried sprouts. E had a second device handy, on which she’d been trying to contact Cassius. He was totally ignoring her and, worse, hadn’t communed with their shared fanciers in like thirty-six hours. The only reason Hadley hadn’t mentioned it was she was so distracted with this reading thing.
“Lots of folks from all over the board,” Hadley said. “The latest thing she does is, she bakes pies while listening to the new rip-rap releases. Like old-fashioned pies with all the fat and everything, the like, lard, and she’s bopping around to Shiest Pax PM or whoever.” Hadley picked something off her shoulder. She shook her little tray of sprouts like someone panning for gold. “Seasoned women of color, you could be stronger there. Traditional cooking enthusiasts. Rip-rap heads—that could certainly be a growth area. Then for both of you, the adult-education advocacy demographic. You won’t get a lot of men out of this, I’ll be honest—a certain portion just from seeing you, of course—but the potential eye-share in women…We ran a test group already; it’s off the charts.”
E glanced at her other device. Still dormant. She picked it up to float Cassius a Memo-Random. She’d tried everything else. She considered her message choices, which she had memorized. She could press 1 for Whud↑babe, 2 for WhereRU, or 3 for ThinknofU. She chose all of them, in that order.
“So, the f’s love it, huh?” she said to Hadley.
“Love isn’t even the word, girl. They were climbing over the tables.”
E had mixed feelings about her fanciers. Secret feelings. She was grateful for them, never quite forgot that she needed them, wanted the numbers of them to keep rising and never plateau—at the same time, though, the more different types of fanciers you had, the more types of a person you had to pretend to be. Not pretend, exactly—she was always herself—but it got exhausting turning the lights way up in one part of your being and way down in another all the time. If you possessed talent and charisma, you were obligated to share it—this she believed—but it was like all the windows in the house of her life were crowded with people looking in, and she could barely see out anymore.
She saw a reply from Cassius. His picture appeared, wearing an all-white suit and sunglasses, taking a bite out of an enormous circular lollipop. She muted herself on the Hadley device and hit the speak-easy button on the other. “Sorry, can’t talk. Miss you.” The voice was like a flight attendant’s, chipper but impatient. The same automatic reply he’d left on every other connection platform she’d tried. E jabbed her finger at the little screen, getting rid of Cassius and his white suit. “When can you talk?” she almost yelled, covering her mouth as if sneezing. “Where the fuck are you?” She couldn’t understand why he was hiding like a child. She’d have to put a 411 on the site saying he had the flu or something. Or was taking a couple mental stability days. Either that or by this time tomorrow she and Hadley would be discussing the best way to positivize his disappearing act. It was true he’d been complaining more and more about being eye-live so much, about the intrusive fame, about all their adventures being planned and plotted, their hobbies and opinions commodified until they were sapped of fun or conviction, but all that whining was part of his charm. Part of his role. As if he didn’t know how lucky they were to get paid to ice skate on the last American glaciers, how lucky to get paid to visit every bar in the Southwest named after a song. She’d figured he was just burned out—the same thing happened to her a couple times a year—but somehow this felt like it was more than that. Well, unless…it didn’t sound like Cassius, it really didn’t, not the Cassius she knew, but she supposed it wasn’t completely impossible he was setting himself up to demand more money from DatDere. It wasn’t inconceivable, was it? She herself had done it a couple times, in the early days. Cassius was a sub-artist of E’s, but his pay-ratio was entirely between him and the company, and he always had been kind of secretive about it. Like, weirdly, lately.
“You’re both individuals who’ve been victimized,” Hadley was saying. E turned her sound back on so she could make a noise of agreement. “Both of you have defied the odds. Selma!!!’s a non-reader because she was born an economically poor person of color in an underfunded rural community. You, you were more or less pulled out of school as a child as soon as your popularity started to burgeon. Your traditional education was sacrificed for the almighty eye-share.”
“For sure,” said E, “but one thing: I don’t want my mom blamed. No way. She’s been through enough—I don’t want anyone shaming her over this.”
“Oh, no way,” said Hadley. “She’s absolutely a victim too. She was caught up in the same machine. And hey, DatDere’s not innocent. We’re part of the machine. We have no problem falling on the sword a little, if that makes sense to the initiative. We’ll say we’re learning too—we’re evaluating our own practices and whatnot.”
E looked around her den at the piles of shoes. High heels made of canvas that had been painted on by poverty-stricken Appalachian kindergarteners. Dress boots whose buckles were fashioned of scrap metal from deactivated land mines. Sandals accented with little clusters of ethically sourced, sugar-free rock candy.
She cleared her throat. “I want a pink Model X,” she told Hadley.
Hadley tipped her head to the side. She smirked fondly at E, appreciatively, like E was naughty but Hadley would expect nothing less.
“That’s how you can scratch my back,” E continued. “And anyway, it’ll partly pay for itself. I can give it to myself for my birthday—for, like, empowerment. We’ll make an initiative out of it. An initiative for you, an initiative for me.”
“A pink Model X,” Hadley said experimentally. “Well…”
E muted herself and spoke a jusText for the other device. “Whatever it is, let’s have a productive one-on-one about it, just us, our eyes only. Let’s reconnect respectfully and rediscover our bond. Love you to itty-bitty pieces. Me.”
“You’re awesome, you know that?” Hadley said.
E unmuted herself to say, “You really think so?”
“Oh, my God—you’re, like, crazy awesome. You always just say what you want—that’s so cool. You always know what you want.”
“You don’t have to be so nice. Everyone doesn’t have to be so nice. I just follow my heart—that’s all I do.”
“I’m not being nice, I’m being honest,” said Hadley. “You’re so good at taking compliments. I wish I could be like that.”
E saw Cassius on the other device. Shades. Lollipop. She muted herself. “Sorry, can’t talk. Miss you.” Again. That same goddamn message. She wanted to throw the device through the window, but Hadley could see her. She wanted to chuck the device off the balcony and let it fall a thousand feet and shatter into a billion next-gen crumbs, but she stayed right where she was and kept an appearance of calm. She took a deep breath and unmuted. “I’m so glad you’re my pallaborator,” she said.
“You’re so real,” said Hadley.
“Aw, so are you,” said E.
“I know it’s, like, your job being real, but you’re totally real besides that too.”
“That means a lot,” said E. “Truly. So much.”
Fucking Cassius. She was going to have to send her driver back to his stupid little apartment they were never allowed to generate content in. She’d sent the guy over twice already, and nothing. If he wasn’t in there smoking his stupid cigarettes no one was supposed to know about or watching confusing movies from forty years ago, where the hell was he? If E really thought about it, which she didn’t want to do, things hadn’t quite been the same with him since his father died, probably five months ago. They’d made a big initiative out of the funeral and affiliated several self-help systems and Kale Surgery had even written them a dance ballad. Cassius had been distracted, hot and cold, ever since then. People commented on it plenty—bipolar some said, or post-traumatic. He barely laughed anymore, there was no arguing that.
“I’ll hash the detes,” Hadley said. “I can see you now. A parking space full of sweet SUV and a pretty head full of books.”
What if it wasn’t his dad? Wasn’t DatDere? What if he just didn’t want her anymore? Could he be tired of her? Taking her for granted? It happened to other beautiful women. Men were so dumb. All the s♥xperts agreed on that—they never knew what was good for them. Still, how could he not want her? Everyone did. He’d become such a weirdo. He had all his money in the stupid bank, however much it was. Didn’t spend a dime. That’s why he thought he could do whatever he wanted—he didn’t owe anybody any money, didn’t have expensive hobbies. He thought he was better than other people because he didn’t buy anything. People had always said he was conceited and they were right. He was conceited that he knew about history and knew how to cook. He thought he was better than everyone else and his teeth weren’t even straight.
E took another deep breath, this time an intentional one from her heart’s center. She got off with Hadley, both of them smiling and waving, Hadley by swishing her whole hand back and forth and E by fluttering her shellacked sapphire nails. Once she was alone, she looked out the big den window at all the scattered points of artificial light suspended against the darkening velvet of the Texas evening. Still no stars. She leaned toward the pair of sandals on the floor and reached to pluck one of the candy clusters off its strap. Crunched it in her back teeth and tasted the natural fruit extracts.
He’s not leveraging for more compensation from DatDere, she suddenly realized. He’s being courted by a whole different platform. He’s getting ready to found his own free-standing franchise. The turd. That had to be it. He was probably on a meeting right this minute scheming about how to appropriate the maximum number of her fanciers, the ungrateful jerk. He wasn’t responding because he’d feel too guilty to go through with it then. He wasn’t responding because he didn’t want to lie to her face, and because with something this low, he certainly couldn’t tell her the truth.
***
The younger man had suspected, before being told, that the older man was former suit-level law enforcement, in fact had always thought of the older man, when he’d seen him from across the diner with his slick-parted yellow-gray hair and simple black wristwatch that did nothing but tell time, as Agent so-and-so. The younger man, for his part, only looked like a security guard once you were told that’s what he was. But once you knew, he couldn’t look like anything else. He had buzzed hair and arched eyebrows. He wore pressed shirts, rolling the sleeves only slightly so that his tattoo of the Texas flag wouldn’t show. It made him feel silly, to hide his tattoo, but he didn’t want strangers commenting on it and didn’t want to be remembered and also there was the fact that he’d gotten the tattoo before moving with his ex-wife to Ohio, where she was from. Now that he was back where he belonged, the ink was unnecessary. Overkill. Trying too hard.
In his room, the older man would take a three-minute shower and then spend twenty minutes meticulously tending his teeth, which were in much better repair than the younger man’s. He would start dozing about nine o’clock, but never, the night through, fall into a deep enough sleep to nourish dreams.
The younger man, over in his narrow little bed, would stay up till two, clicking through the endless content streams, eyes burning and stomach beginning to growl, and never settle on anything for more than five minutes, but then would slumber like the dead, like a man at the bottom of the sea, unreachable by any disturbance, for five straight hours.
***
Cassius awakened with a start and anxiously shimmied himself out of his sleeping bag, the dusty floor planks of the little shack he’d slept in giving way just a bit under his weight, as if they weren’t properly nailed down or were warped from age and use. He got himself standing and got his bearings, the persistent light of dawn slanting in the front windows and illuminating motionless swirls of dust suspended in the air. He tapped the pockets of his shorts reflexively, frisking himself for his device, but of course found nothing. Nothing he owned was here. Not even the sleeping bag belonged to him—it had been provided by Empty S ace; so had the threadbare clothing he wore. All he’d been permitted to bring were his sneakers and his cheap plastic sunglasses, and the shoes had been examined for hidden electronics when he’d checked in last night. If he were in his apartment, the coffee would already be brewing. Fair trade beans, as far as he knew. Locally roasted, as far as he knew. If he were in his apartment, the shades would be closed and the lights would be on and the air conditioner pumping and his favorite sun-up topic exchange would be scrolling in the living room and some Lightnin’ Hopkins would be playing quietly on the atMOSTphere.
The shack was silent. Silent like when you were in a big crowd and you looked up at the daytime moon and everything disappeared for a minute. Cassius saw the pot hanging from a peg over on the wall. In the back corner stood a pot-belly oven and a stack of wood. There was a water pump, he’d been told, out behind the shack. A half-hour of manual labor for a cup of probably weak coffee—he’d skip it this morning, at least until he got a headache. He stepped to the front of the shack and, one at a time, hoisted each naked window, scraping wood against wood, then did the same to the windows on the back wall, letting fresh, dry air into the stale space. It was chilly now, but it would be hot soon enough—he remembered this from camping trips with his father, the way a flip switched out on the rough Texas prairies about halfway through the morning, the sun getting a bead and pushing down on everything with its sultry, relentless weight, and then around dinnertime the switch flipped again, the chill returning immediately like a hollow minor chord.
He’d been picking at his fingertips all night, even in his sleep, had felt their rawness against the rough window sashes. A couple of his nails were close to bleeding. He hadn’t done this since he was a kid, pick his fingers. His father’s death hadn’t caused him to revert to the habit, but the absence of his device for only a few hours had. His hands knew what they wanted. They wanted the smooth, molded, perfectly balanced weight. The diamond-bright screen. His fingers wanted to tap and swipe. To find what there was to find, and the next thing and the next. You weren’t allowed a device out here, obviously—you weren’t even allowed a deck of cards until Day 3, a jigsaw puzzle on Day 10. You were supposed to face yourself down out in the stark wilderness, corner yourself where no corners existed, go outside in order to look inside, force yourself to say something important, to say lines you’d written yourself. And it really was just Cassius. No one else in sight. Fifty acres marked off with sandstone cairns, and then a five-hundred-yard buffer before the next range. Don’t break your leg, they’d told Cassius, the freckled, bowl-cut women who’d briefly oriented him. Don’t have a stroke or nothing. While you slept, they snuck in and delivered your food for the next day. No plates or silverware. Apples cores and banana peels—you could throw those off in the weeds.
Cassius slipped on his shoes and went over and pulled open the miscut pine door—no lock to unlatch—and stepped out onto a porch made of the same loose, knotty planks as inside. The sun was on his legs and when he sat down to the food bundle it was on his arms and face, lancing in through the branches of a leafless hardwood tree that stood alone a stone’s throw from the shack and that seemed to mark the edge of the vast, patchy, hard-earthed expanse that rolled out toward the horizon. Cassius’ heart was fluttery—it was from not eating for so long, since his lunch yesterday of Armenian yogurt and amaranth crackers, or it was from the brittle, pollen-laden air that felt too dry to get down into his lungs, or it was the feeling that he was missing something that was going on in his real life, back in the real world, a hundred different people trying to keep him informed about a hundred different things—quotes to find humorous, acts to find deplorable, movements to be wary of, ideas to ridicule, milestones to celebrate, magnificent breakfasts, talented housecats. Perfect, tall waves were crashing one after the next on the shore of human consciousness and Cassius wasn’t surfing them. Everyone else was, but not Cassius. He was tied up under the pier, twine cutting into his wrists, blindfolded and gagged.
He was doing it again, picking his fingertips, both of his thumbs tormented to bright red. He stopped long enough to unbundle everything—a carrot, a hard-boiled egg, jerky of some sort, dried fruit down in the bottom. He knew he was hungry, but he didn’t feel like eating, his stomach too unsettled. There was a small grapefruit. That might work. He picked it up and dug his fingernails into the skin—what was left of his fingernails—and felt the mild sting of the juice. Instantly he could smell the lush, fragrant citrus odor. It almost made him sneeze. He peeled the fruit naked and ate it slowly section by section, each bite-sized morsel bursting heavily and wetly in his mouth, curing a thirst he hadn’t realized he’d had. When he finished, he wiped his lips on his forearm—no napkin—then arose and tossed the peels into the thick sedge trying to overtake the porch. He wandered back inside, not sure why, listening again to the sandy shuff of his shoe-soles on the planks. Out the back windows he sighted the pump, looking like a starved burro out in the scrap-brush. Wood stove. Pot. Sleeping bag in a heap where he’d left it. He found himself pacing back and forth across the room, three times, four times, just listening, just feeling the planks give way under his weight and then immediately, with a quick creak, recover. He could hear the breeze lisping through the windows. He could hear his own voice in his head, reminding him what the women had told him: Week 1 was detox—hope for nothing but to see it through. Week 2 was remembering who you were on a cellular level. Week 3 was beginning to live as a sane human animal.
He went back out onto the porch and looked in through the front windows at the impossibly bare room. There it was. Why would it be any different? Inside. Outside. Just glass in between, and not even that, since he’d opened the windows. He stepped over the edibles, which he’d been instructed to eat all at once, in one big morning meal, and now he was pacing the porch, the length of it, back and forth, just as he’d done inside. There was foreground and background out there, but it was all the same, an identical view in every direction he looked—shallow, burnt rises and mild troughs with green at their bottoms and beaten, craggy shrubs so harried by the winter that they couldn’t enjoy spring.
A panic swept up through Cassius, stomach to head, a clammy sweat breaking out on his temples. He was missing everything. Now.Image chapters and o-Ping-ions and HIsign beacons and dozens of Curren-see gambits. A tsunami could’ve wiped out part of the world this morning. Hostages could’ve been taken at an embassy somewhere. Back in Dallas, an old last-century apartment building could’ve burned to the ground or a child could’ve drowned in the Trinity River. But this is what he’d wanted. What he’d asked for and paid for. To stop knowing every single disturbing thing that happened in the universe, to stop knowing everyone else’s thoughts so he could know his own. Back in normal life, his virtual assistant was at the end of her rope trying to signal Cassius that Erica was at the end of her rope. He’d set an auto-reply, which must’ve been driving Erica batty. He’d set it to switch to, “At Empty S ace. Sorry. Didn’t know what else to do. Love you a metric ton. Talk when I’m back.” She’d start getting that message at, well, probably at right about now, 8AM. Now that he was here, she couldn’t reach him, but he didn’t want her to actually worry. More than that, he didn’t want her mounting a public search that would draw record numbers of fanciers and then soon after its resolution be suspected as a hoax, which would then bring even more attention, a multi-platform circus, people voracious to condemn and defend, people needing their voices heard like their lives depended on it. Poor Erica. He really did feel bad. They had the cartwheel competition for Little Sisters/Big Futures tomorrow. In twenty-four hours. It was taking a long time for even one of those hours to pass, but it was only a day, no more and no less. What was ahead of him was just a single day. And then there’d be another. After that, another. Jesus. He hadn’t pluss+d any of Erica’s In Medias Recs in two whole days now, but those had been real days, not whatever he was in now. He hadn’t tripled down any of her (s)inputs or hyped any of her ©RAVES.
Cassius laughed aloud and the noise startled him, booming in his ears, causing him to halt in his pacing and grab the splintery wood of the porch post with his soft palm. He sucked in a breath, the air only reaching partway down into his lungs. His hacking guffaw had made everything else go quiet again; he stood still and waited as the sounds returned one by one—upbeat crickets, irritated birds, the lazy luffing of the sparse grasses, the scuttling of rodents hidden out in the rises. He closed his eyes to calm himself, but all he could see was his device. It was sitting there where he’d abandoned it, on the low Japanese table next to his yoga mat and his bonsai. It would remain alive into next week, its internal desk piled higher and higher with communications of all sorts, eventually buried, until it finally exhausted its battery and the backup battery and the backup-backup battery and shamefully gave up its post.
Cassius stepped off the porch, no plan where he was going, and wended himself forward into the harassed, brown-scabbed hectares, a dozen steps in a direction that might’ve been north, a dozen more, out of the shade of the defeated hardwood, the spiny groundcover prickling his calves. He stopped, squinting even behind his sunglasses, feeling light, nude, unarmed, walking away from his shelter with only his clothes. He tapped his empty pockets front and back. It didn’t matter that he was leaving the shack without his device because his device was over two hundred miles away. He wasn’t with his device so it didn’t matter where he went. It didn’t matter what thoughts crossed his mind. He walked another dozen steps without really meaning to, trailing his fingers through the waist-high seed-bunches that topped the grasses. He stopped and stood still and listened again—there was something questioning in the buzz of the cracked plains, something plaintive the breeze called up out of the endless harsh landscape.
Cassius shucked his sneakers off by the heels and stepped away from them. He could feel the stubbly, crabby vegetation, cool and stiff against the bottoms of his feet. When the grass gave way, he could feel the sand, its stony coarseness that meant him no harm. The grass again. The sand again. His ankles itched, and so he walked faster, a bounce in his stride, his arms held out from his sides as if for balance, sinking down in a shy hollow where he couldn’t see the shack behind him, rising again and turning his head and there it was, smaller now, diminished but not quite incidental—walked on, down again and up again, until he felt the first drop of sweat and then many more slipping down his ribcage, until his chest worked hard to get air, his breaths choppy.
No food, no water, no shoes—under the sway of his own momentum he kept on, down into a deeper depression where wildflowers flashed here and there, back up, his pace determined, what bracken there was growing drier and thinner and easier to walk through. More of the small, white blossoms, some of the petals blowing around like confetti. A pair of buzzards above, so high they seemed perfectly still, so high they couldn’t have been looking for anything; they were just up there, getting away from constant death the way Cassius was getting away from his sanctioned, stilted life. Ahead he saw a grove of bigger trees, healthy trees with leaves on their limbs. As he tracked toward them, prickly pear appeared, a few and then corps of them, flattened to the ground, their paddles dusty, and now breaches could be seen in the desiccated earth that were likely snake holes. The light streaming down through the crowns of the cottonwoods—Cassius recognized them and could see their fluff in the air—was shot through with a strained, golden tint. He slipped off his sunglasses and allowed the glare to ring in his eyes. As he passed the trees just beyond their skirts of shade, he tossed the glasses into a drift of wild rye and they disappeared as irreversibly as if he’d dropped them over the rail of a cruise ship.
Cassius hiked for what felt like another five minutes, and then another five, and another. Or maybe the intervals were ten minutes each, or fifteen. He could see his device flopping around on the Japanese table like a gasping fish. He could see a cartoon version of the device, steam blowing out its ears, buzzing itself hoarse. Already, Cassius’ feet had grown accustomed to their rough work. His hands weren’t pale, weren’t shaky. His breaths were coming full, all the way to the bottom of his lungs. He walked farther, walked on, the sun peering nosily over his shoulder, sweating and sweating until he peeled off his shirt and tied it around his forehead to keep the salty drips from his eyes—walked on still, not stopping his progress until he came upon a dry gully full of smooth stones that were warm to the touch when he knelt down to them. An arroyo, this was called. He perched himself to rest on one of the bigger stones and straightened his back until it cracked. He looked back the direction he’d come from and didn’t see anything familiar. He’d hiked the cottonwoods away. The buzzards were gone. He felt the heat of the stone ticking up through him, warming him from inside the way the sun was warming him from outside. The skin of his forearms was tingly and tight—he hadn’t had a sunburn in ages. The arches of his feet had sustained several small cuts, but none bled. Blue sky above, a tatter of clouds off in the periphery, trying not to fade to nothing.
Something moved a short way down the arroyo, jerking Cassius’ head that direction. He couldn’t find it with his eyes until it moved a second time. His mind raced to place it—yes, he knew what it was, it was a roadrunner. It was still except for its head, which pivoted this way and that, waiting to see what Cassius was going to do, checking its other flank, checking behind it. He had seen these as a child, with his father, and this one gave the same impression those had—drab and nervous and out-of-place. Nervous in a human way, like an over-caffeinated accountant. The roadrunner seemed to expect Cassius to stand, and he did so, seemed to expect Cassius to step toward it, and Cassius did this as well. He didn’t give fast chase; he picked his way deliberately up the dry river and the roadrunner retreated at the exact same speed, keeping an unchanging distance between them. Of course, roadrunners looked out of place. Where would an unwieldy, mostly flightless bird belong? Cassius followed it over the ragged piles of rocks, careful not to slip and lose his balance, and then around a bend, losing sight of the haughty critter for a moment and then finding it again. He followed it down through a low spot where puddles survived, then finally up and out of the arroyo and onto a sun-caked flat picketed with spiny little herbs that smelled like soap when Cassius tread upon them.
He’d lost the booger again. Nowhere in sight. Nothing moving. He waited. Held still. Nope, the thing was gone. Cassius looked at his feet. His fingertips. He found a bare spot on the rough, pebbly highland and sat down to rest; after a minute, he went ahead and flattened all the way onto his bare back, his skin pressing right onto the heated, sandpaper earth. He was hungry now, a pit inside him. Hungrier than he’d been in a long time. And then there was another feeling, a lightness of limb, an incongruous pulse of hilarity, of comic perverseness, swimming around in his brain. Incongruous like the roadrunner. It was the sly thrill of being lost. Where were the cairns? How far was he from the shack? Had he been going around in circles? He was lost in the wilderness and lost from civilization. This had to be the plan, though. This had to be what was supposed to happen. He heard a voice in his head, but it wasn’t his own. The voice was his father’s, saying, “We ain’t lost. The place we’re going just ain’t found us yet.” Deep and mellow, the voice—a little gruff, but ironically aware of its own gruffness. They’d be out on a dirt road somewhere, hours from anything Cassius knew, eating peanuts and throwing the shells out the windows, his father with a big thermos of coffee and a little flask of whisky. The place that wound up finding them would be a hidden swimming hole or a cave you could pay five dollars to explore with a flashlight. Sometimes it was just a cliff where you could watch hot air balloons. A range where you could fire a real bow and arrow. Cassius could barely slit his eyes open for the roaring high song of the sun straight above, but he felt alert. He felt ready for anything.
What his father said even more often, he remembered, was, “Have fun. Have manners.” In fact, he’d even wheezed out this directive on his deathbed. Cassius’ father had been known for his manners. His anachronistic, gentlemanly ways. He’d once driven twenty miles at the last minute to procure ingredients for a sweet potato stew when he’d learned that an uninvited dinner-party guest was vegetarian. He held doors for everyone like an usher. Fetched fresh drinks for everyone like a waiter. People used to comment to Cassius about his father’s manners, often with a gleam in their eye that meant the manners would surely be passed on to him. He remembered his father boning up on the interests of his acquaintances, just so he could converse better if he ran into the person. His father had said part of manners was not holding someone’s lack of manners against them—that had to be the hardest part. A grasshopper alighted on Cassius’ chest—not green like in a storybook, but brown and papery—and leapt back off as soon as Cassius raised his head to peer at it. Cassius’ vision was blurred. He could see himself from high above but couldn’t make out his features, couldn’t make out the shiny, chestnut hair and ice-green eyes that everybody loved. Have fun. Have manners. He didn’t have either, he didn’t suppose. What was fun? Like, what was it, exactly? He recalled a time his father had taken the blame for busting one of the neighbor lady’s big A-frame windows. The guilty family was broke and would’ve been hard pressed to pay for the repair, probably would’ve denied it, probably the police would’ve been involved, the mood soured for a good, long time on the entire street. Mostly, Cassius’ father didn’t want the old woman to endure a big ordeal. He had confessed that he and Cassius had broken the window playing baseball, though there was no evidence of this, rather than reveal that the other neighbor’s teenage son, who’d already been expelled from a couple different schools, had shot it out with a high-end slingshot while drunk on malt liquor. Cassius’ father paid for the fix, and then he strolled over and told the guy and his kid that if he ever again saw either one of them with a beer in one hand and a weapon in the other, well, that they wouldn’t be big fans at all of his reaction to that.
Cassius’ head snapped over to one side before he even knew why. There it was again, sure enough, the roadrunner. The excitable speedster could do this forever. Wanted to do this, or else it would be testing its awkward wings to make an escape. It held its head as high as it could reach, its beak at a regal cant. Cassius kept his face expressionless. Very slowly he sat upright and then even more slowly he rotated into a crouch, a starting-block stance, the muscles in his legs tensing to hold his weight steady. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears and feel the hot sun on his back. He could smell his own sweat and could smell the uncatchable roadrunner’s clean, neat, desert-colored feathers.
***
The neighborhood was pristine, the houses monstrous structures of sandstone and oak that were only partly visible from the roads. Manicured lawns, some with seams still visible between the squares of sod. Solar panels on the roofs. Mailboxes that adhered to the architectural style, like little models of the actual homes. The men were in the van. They were reminding each other that this would be their final outing, no contact of any kind for a year. No more going to the diner. Nothing. Total strangers.
“I like you plenty,” said the older man, “but I find out you’re moonlighting, if I even catch wind you stole a candy bar, I’ll make a sound business decision. Don’t think I won’t. I’ll look out for my own very personal interests.”
“Right back at you,” the younger man said. “Ditto on everything. Fondest regards, but physical liberty comes first.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that. I’m glad we’re on the same page.”
“I don’t even eat candy bars,” the younger man added.
The older man turned off the radio, which was giving advice on buying pre-owned smart refrigerators. He came to a full halt at the red sign and paused a second to finish his coffee. Now the street names were all famous old chefs. They were on Puck Boulevard, crossing Child Way. “The only crimes you get away with anymore are white collar crimes and crimes you have no reason to commit. None anybody would expect anyway.”
“I know I’m not changing the world,” the younger man said. “Only venture capitalists can do that. But still, justice feels so damn good. It’s just so fucking fun to be the karma police—that was the old song, right? Karma Police? What else feels like this? You know? What else would be worth this kind of risk?”
“Well, money, a lot of people would say.”
They were moving again, both of them nonchalantly but meticulously scanning each estate they drove past. No folks. No dogs. No traffic on the streets but stray delivery trucks. In the distance, the sparkling buildings of the city could be seen, each outreaching the next for thinner, brighter air. The men spaced their reallocations—they’d gotten to where they could use this word without smirking—at odd time intervals: six weeks, then three weeks, then four months. They varied the means, the time of day, the region of the country. This was a relative home job. As close as they were willing to get. They had performed seven of these. They’d reallocated the founder of a news organization—choosing based on convenience one of the dozens—whose business model was to exploit and deepen and often create from whole cloth division and polarization between Americans. They’d done a near-billionaire televangelist. A hedge fund lobbyist after a party her clients had thrown her—she’d been so drunk, she seemed happy to see them. They always made sure in advance that no family would be around, and tried to make as little noise and mess as possible.
Today’s target had founded a channel that paid people a modest monthly stipend–mostly addicts and felons—for the rights to their death scenes. These individuals’ entire lives were filmed on the off-chance they got hit by a car or bitten by a rattlesnake or shot when a deal went bad. Like nature photographers, the cameramen never intervened—in fact, they were legally forbidden to. If the subject died of illness or age, whatever transpired between them and their loved ones in the final moments was public entertainment.
The older man pulled the van into a little parking area in front of a pumphouse that matched the homes and the mailboxes—beige stone and heavy, dark wood. Hats pulled low over their eyes, tool bags swinging from their gloved hands, they stepped down from the van and strode around the front of it and began walking side by side, almost in step, up a slight grade toward the next broad property. At the top of the slight rise, they left the street in unison and casually sidestepped through a gap in the ten-foot hedge, emerged onto a bright green lawn, then fell back into their side-by-side formation and kept on. Privacy. The wealthy always got their privacy. There was no one to see the men, except whoever looked at the house’s security footage later, and they would only see hat brims and leather gloves, two determined forms of average height, sleeves covering any tattoos, plain pants, boots available for order anywhere and in an average size.
They crossed with no hurry or apparent anxiety the entire front yard of the house—cobblestone walkways, turtle ponds, a little Zen sand trap with a miniature rake where somebody had drawn the infinity symbol—and then rounded the four-car garage and strolled back into the most secluded sector of the grounds, no word or signal between them, past an enormous, humping air conditioning unit and a row of twine-secured lime saplings. A long line of windows spanned this side of the place—empty exercise room, storage room, empty guest bedroom: Both men went still as marble when they heard a voice droning from inside. They glanced at each other. One more room down. The older man put his back to the wall and edged forward and peeked in an inch at a time—bookshelf full of biographies and foreign artifacts and candles, an empty six-foot-high vase standing in the corner, a painting of a dilapidated Mexican hovel with a girl in the doorway…and yup, a little farther, there was the guy, barefoot, sitting at a big, glass desk with two, no three tablets and a healthy fern on it. Expensive tequila on a matching glass sideboard. The guy’s suitcoat hung from the back of his minimalist chair—ostrich leather on the chair, it looked like—and he wore only a T-shirt, probably of a heavy metal band. It was definitely the guy. One of his gimmicks was he wore designer suits with vintage heavy metal T-shirts.
“I guess I’m a little confused by the word ‘immediately,’” he boomed into an earpiece the older man couldn’t see from his angle. “Twenty-five percent can be souped all kinds of ways, believe me, I know, but ‘immediately’ generally means, I don’t know, like pretty fucking pronto. Like pretty fucking proximate on the timeline to the fucking present.” The guy rocked in his chair, turning slightly, and the older man could see the patch of hair the guy still retained toward the front of his head. He could see the massive class ring, could hear it tapping the glass as the guy drummed his fingers. “How about a complete transaction log? No shorthand. No briefing. How about that? Don’t send it to Steve. Send it right to me. I used to be a lawyer too, you know. If there’s bullshit under the hay, I’ll smell it.”
The older man felt calm head to foot, his training coursing back into his veins, the relief of doing something. He wasn’t quite gloating like his compatriot, but this did feel undeniably right. He’d done more good in the last eighteen months than in thirty years of following orders and filing reports, thirty years of bringing amoral vampires in for their slaps on the wrist, watching them walk right back out into the world and keep doing whatever it was he’d brought them in for. He nodded at the younger man, who turned automatically and began to soundlessly retrace his steps back around the front of the house; if the target ran, the younger man would be waiting. But the guy would be too shocked to run, him and his stupid bare feet, and then it would be too late. Only women had the jungle wherewithal to flee immediately. The older man flexed his hands in his gloves. He took a few slow breaths and blinked his eyes hard. He couldn’t be taken by surprise if this guy fought back. They hardly ever ran, but sometimes they fought. Even if their fights had for decades only involved interest rates and royalty points and tax loopholes, sometimes these assholes had more of the old instinct in them than even they knew. Sometimes, before they were reallocated, they got a few fleeting moments of real, vivid, panting life.
