Exactly the party he came for.
Lion’s a little wobbly when he opens his eyes, less so as he sheds a few layers. Gray jacket on chair, black hooded sweatshirt beside it, and into push-up position. Now for part two of his plan. Chest to ground and back up again. A set of fifty, then forty, then thirty, twenty, ten, five, three, one. Fast as he can. Lying on his back and staring at the sky between rounds, panting like a dog.
Lying there, he remembers Fetu telling him about the relationship between the empathic and the mnemonic. Overlapping skills, he’d said. To feel another’s feelings, we need the brain to hunt for similar situations from our own past, times when we felt then what the other is feeling now. Why the fMRI scans of em-trackers showed mirror neurons in overdrive, heavy hippocampal action, and extensive mnemonic networks, much more complex than controls. Why, when Lion recalls William James penning a letter to his brother Henry, he doesn’t just have the episodic prowess to remember all the words, he has the emphatic talent to find the emotion that preceded those words.
Dear Henry,
I have read your latest. And while I am still not certain why you insist on so much not saying what you’re saying, I will SHOUTSHOUTSHOUT from the rooftops it is the greatest work yet in this English language and I will chase down and throttle with my cane anyone who dares say differently.
Your Brother, William
Then it comes: an overwhelming wash of brotherly love and loyalty, a sensation so strong Lion momentarily forgets himself. Instead, the future opens up inside of him. An expansive, room-to-breathe liberation and how he knows that even though the storybooks might not bother to tell this tale, the fealty felt by the brothers James was a force that shaped history.
Fetu had a theory here too: Em-trackers have a kind of eidetic somatic recall—like a photographic memory for emotions, a deadly accurate felt-sense of the past that allows them to find truth in the future.
Now he’s awake.
Lion stands back up and walks back inside. Cell phone at 37 percent and clock reading 5:12 A.M.
He uses the phone’s glow to track a light switch. An upward flip turns on a Zephyr salon hair dryer from the 1930s, repurposed as a chandelier. Named for the Greek god of the west wind, for America’s love of speed and power, now casting its soft yellow glow from Flokati throw rug in one corner of the room to white marble bedside table in the other.
The bedside table where Penelope’s package remains, unopened.
Box first, envelope second.
The box contains white tissue paper wrapped around his Moleskine. He flips through the pages, his single note, the rest looking unmolested. The envelope holds a square of white paper, thick rag weave and more mesh electronics. The Arctic icon sits in the bottom right corner. Now exposed to the air and fresh with oxygen, it winks pink, just once. There’s also a short note:
Jenka says you dropped this on the floor at your meeting. He’s lying, of course. XO Penelope.
Then
P.S. If you want to go to the Hamptons, message me and Bo will pick you up.
And a number.
XO Penelope? Not the message he’d been expecting. Did he accidentally make a friend? Or is this just another form of Arctic guerrilla marketing?
Lion heads for the shower, thinking this through. Flirting has to be the original form of guerrilla marketing, from back before markets even existed. But there were always suckers, he reminds himself.
Three minutes. Five minutes. He lets the hot water beat on his shoulders while steam layers the mirror. Then folds forward, pressing his fingers to the ground, letting the water pound his back for a while.
Toweling off, he knows before he knows, something’s been decided. Just a tiny thrum of excitement. How he used to feel on the front end of a story, tracking curiosity to curiosity, that little rush when things start to come together. So he delays his flight and spends a day in the Hamptons and maybe his em-tracking system provides a new answer. Not likely. But he can’t deny that he likes feeling like this.
He also knows Arctic’s up to something. “Our business is change” still echoing in his ears. Absolutely a reason to say no.
Knows he’s going to say yes.
Decision made, he doesn’t bother to dither. Texts Penelope, asks her to double his day rate, and wants Bo there by nine. Also types: XO Lion.
Hits SEND and, immediately, regrets it.
Five uneasy minutes. Seven. Around nine he’s had enough of himself, so grabs Dune from his pack—thinking, for the umpteenth time, that he might be the last man on earth to pack in paperbacks.
Even his mom Kindles.
Book in hand, he forces a sit-down on the couch. Muted aquamarine cushions and gold silk throw pillows and he still can’t get comfortable. Gives up and opens the book.
For the next ten minutes, he tries to move words off page and into brain but keeps glancing at the phone. What is he, in the fifth grade? But he can’t think of anything else.
Five minutes later, a titillation from the table. He grabs the phone and checks the screen.
Done, XO
And Bo is there by nine.
CLAPBOARD MODERN ON A SIZABLE LOT
Driving out of the city and the licking pug says the Sunrise Highway is bumper to bumper, so Bo drops them down to the old Montauk. Two lanes for nearly a hundred miles and Lion dozes for much of the ride. He catches sights in snatches: West Islip, East Patchogue, state parks, surf clubs, vestigial saltboxes, past the walking dunes in East Montauk and nearing the seaside cliffs of Ditch Plains before they break inland. Captain Balfour Way, north for two miles, a sharp right and a long slice of gravel driveway, curving out of sight.
Acres of tall trees in every direction.
At the top of the driveway, Bo parks under a grandfather oak. Through the windshield, Lion can make out an oversized rectangular house wrapped in gray wooden shingles and white cottage trim.
Clapboard modern on a sizable lot.
“I’m going to walk the grounds,” he says.
“Want company?”
Lion’s em-tracking machinery works better on solo, and he says as much. Bo picks his copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem off the dash, then slides the window down, just halfway. “Holla if you need me.”
Getting out of the car, Lion has that sense of being watched, maybe from above, maybe from the trees. He looks around slowly, staring into the forest, but can’t find the source.
Deciding to follow a gravel path that winds around the eastern side of the house, Lion passes a small front porch, an oval parking area, and a five-car garage. A cluster of white elms stands beyond, probably genetically tweaked to be disease resistant and part of the East Coast reintroduction program.
He also realizes his earlier assessment was off. The house only appears to be a long rectangle. His tour reveals three rectangles, each half the size of the previous, stacked in an offset row. White metal suspension porches hang off each, anchored to the house by steel guide wires, and casting long shadows across the lawn.
Lion walks the path once clockwise and once counterclockwise and for no reason he can think of beyond avoiding the sight of Walker’s head for a little longer. And when was the last time he cased a crime scene?
Stepping around another corner, he remembers. That Slenderman job, about a decade back. Em-tracking his way back to the original Reddit poster, just a shy Millennial from Pasadena wanting what many shy Millennials from Pasadena want: to write a horror story and start a movement.
Along the way, Lion visited the site of the ritual, the stabbing. The woods in Waukesha, Wisconsin, in cold November. He found remnant crime tape attached to bare trees, the yellow plastic fading, but still the only color around for miles.
He knew then—Slenderman was just the beginning.
A few years later the press dubbed the phenomenon “emergent storytelling,” a fictional tale written collectively by a nearly anonymous internet, then veering into reality—first via teenage girls and ritual sacrifice, then as
an Amazon miniseries about that sacrifice. Some kind of meta-meta chain that only a Derridean would grok. Also a different approach to the truth, which might be why Lion saw it coming.
A third lap around the house to continue avoiding Walker’s head for just a little while longer. It doesn’t quite ease his unease. Lion can’t shake the feeling that he’s still being watched. He slow-pans around the forest. Stately elms and oaks, stories high, and then a dash of sherbet.
Not paranoia, after all.
About thirty feet away, a Mexican amber dragonfly with orange lace wings and garnet eyes perches on the lip of a leaf, watching him intensely. He gazes back for a moment. Glam rock colors meet prehistoric optical design, and usually not found east of Arizona.
“So what are you doing here?” Lion wants to know.
With no answer forthcoming, he glances back at the house, spotting a stairway that leads up to one of the suspension porches. By the time he looks back, the dragonfly has departed, the forest darker.
He crosses to the stairway and climbs up to peer in one of Robert Walker’s windows. Floors of hard wood, walls painted flat gray, and a glassed-in fireplace surrounded by slender Italian couches. The gentle touch of an expensive decorator. What Lion doesn’t see, scanning back and forth, is a trophy room chockablock with dead mammal heads, Walker’s among them.
He tries the porch door but finds it locked. Back down the stairs and to the car. “Do you have the keys?” he asks, through the half-open window.
Bo opens the center console and takes out a pair of oversized keys, big and brassy, like they were made for a pirate chest. Also a small piece of Arctic stationery with an eight-digit number.
“Top lock,” holding up a pirate key, “alarm code,” holding up the stationery, “bottom lock,” holding up the other.
Lion slides the set into his coat pocket, grabs his sling-pack from the backseat, and starts toward the house. Reaching the front door, he slips his pack off his shoulder, opens the lid, and removes the dragon box.
More than one way to case a crime scene.
Lion opens the box and removes a vial of Ghost Trainwreck. He rolls quickly, lights up, and looks for the door’s lock.
Not where it should be.
Instead, he sees a small wooden panel, which opens to reveal a pair of gaping keyways. A click as he turns the first key, another panel slides open, a small keypad. Lion pulls the paper from his pocket and taps in the code. Then bottom key into bottom lock, and an industrial whirring as the front door slides left, sucked into a slot hidden in the jamb.
Stepping through the entrance, Lion finds himself in a wide hall, facing his reflection in an enormous mirror. He sees some older creature, jet-lagged eyes, hair at geometrically difficult angles from sleeping in the SUV.
Or maybe this is just what he looks like now.
Lion glances left and right. Left spills into a kitchen, right into a great room. He tries to think like a detective, but that doesn’t even last a second. Not law enforcement material, he decides, hitting the joint.
Blowing smoke toward the kitchen, he heads toward the great room, remembering that New York is one of the final three states not to legalize marijuana, then wondering about Richard having to explain the smell to the police. Who’s he kidding. Richard’s not the type to bother explaining.
The great room is tall ceilings and sparse furnishings. A large brick fireplace. Coffee tables of African blackwood and couches in Cape Cod white. Three books on an end table. Lion picks them up one at a time. Photographs by Peter Beard, Swahili for Dummies, and a leather-bound collection of Hemingway’s short stories with a bookmark marking two-thirds of the way through “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”
Setting them down, he backtracks to the kitchen. Nothing out of place. A glass-fronted refrigerator: a cheese plate with prosciutto and olives visible on the central shelf, orange juice in slender white cartons on the top shelf, and ten small mason jars with salad dressing and folksy labels stacked on the side. So neat that it looks like someone was paid to arrange the food.
Lion takes a step closer, peering in. The vegetable drawers are empty. The cheese drawer holds a wedge of Parmesan. The freezer is all meat. One tall stack with more folksy labels. Venison, buffalo, kangaroo.
So food as a form of vanity.
Also, looking around the kitchen again, that expensive decorator. Probably, judging from the fresh bag in the trash bin, a housekeeper. But no food-trace of a girlfriend. No wife.
Robert Walker, Lion decides, was a bachelor.
He walks out of the kitchen and into the breakfast nook. Gray walls and wide windows peering into heavy forest. The only furnishing a square wooden table, empty save for a second set of pirate keys tossed absently at its center. Paper plane-ticket debris beneath them.
Nothing to see here.
He backs out of the room, but stops and glances at the table. Even Lion, with his throwback ways, doesn’t use paper plane tickets anymore. Crosses over for a closer look. Not a ticket.
Unfolding the paper, Lion finds an itemized bill for the Twombly Hunting Ranch, Killeen, Texas. Four nights, five days: rooms at a thousand a night; twelve hundred in food and beverage; four thousand three hundred in poker chips; thirty-six thousand for two kills.
Itemized as well.
Twenty-two thousand for a black rhino; twelve thousand for an Iberian lynx. Taxidermy, mounting, and shipping included.
Lion feels sweat on his brow and a churn in his stomach. He knows it’s more than a feeling. Spins around, trying to find a bathroom. Two doors against the far wall of the nook. The first discloses a well-stocked pantry, the second a stairway to the upstairs. A warning lurch and Lion realizes he doesn’t have a clue where to puke in this house.
He backtracks instead, barely making the sink in time for a strong heave of partially digested Dirty French eggs and hash browns. Three or four follow-up heaves.
Lion was always an animal lover, but em-tracking deepened that bond. So now he deals with uncontrollable vomiting in the face of abject cruelty. An innate reaction, was how Fetu described it, a somatic rejection, the disgust response dialed up to eleven.
Resistance is useless.
Also one of the ways researchers first learned to identify em-trackers. The reigning theory says the retching is the by-product of a fundamental widening of spheres of empathy, past the color lines, gender lines, and out-group/in-group concerns. Beyond the border of species. The best among them can feel all the way around the planet, and those contest winners, the first em-trackers who got to ride Musk’s rocket around the moon, claimed to be able to push it out to galactic levels.
Lion wipes puke from his mouth with a towel from a drawer, realizing he’s still clutching the bill. He tosses it back on the table, knowing his initial instinct was right: Whoever beheaded Walker—Lion really would like to shake his hand.
He looks left, then right.
Which way to the decapitation?
BRINGTHEWILDLIFEHOME.COM
From four feet away, Robert Walker’s head looks like something from an old TV show. Neutral and nonviolent. Or as neutral and nonviolent as a decapitated head can be.
Four feet, Lion has also determined, is the critical distance necessary to blur the edges of his peripheral vision. From here, he can look at the head and not quite see the rest of the trophy room. A way to concentrate on the task at hand and ignore the pillage and plunder of Noah’s Ark that surrounds him.
“Done puking,” he tells Walker’s head.
But there’s still too much carnage in the peripheral. He takes a couple of deep breaths to steady his stomach, then lifts a Mongolian antelope off the wall. Hard to ignore those sad eyes and long face, nose like a twin-piped hot rod, eyebrows bushy and arched. A hard life on the Eurasian steppe, even before it was cut short.
Head in hand, Lion surveys the room. He realizes there’s no foul stench. No scent of rotting flesh. Glancing at Walker’s head, he notes the sheen of shellac, just like he’
d seen in the picture. Walker wasn’t just decapitated. Someone went to the trouble to preserve him. Someone with taxidermy skills. Gang related? A warning of some kind? He can’t tell, so on with the survey.
Next up, tartan wallpaper. It isn’t of the old school Scottish variety. More modern. Shimmering poly-fabric, light green on dark green stripes, highlights of sagebrush. The heads are a bigger problem. It’s the eyes that bother him most. Avoidance the better choice. He flips the antelope facedown, a back plate made of teak, the price tag still attached.
$59.95 from BringTheWildlifeHome.com.
Walking the wildlife across the room, he sets it in a back corner, on the floor beside Walker’s desk. He takes a moment at the desk. Opening the main drawer reveals a Montblanc Masterpiece with platinum nib, packages of ink refills, and nothing else. A side drawer holds a gold-plated Rolodex.
Subtle, thinks Lion, very subtle.
As he’s departing the desk, he notices a flash of silver on the floor. Reaching down, he picks up a squat cylinder with a plastic screw top. Maybe some kind of pen holder? Lion doesn’t know what to make of it, so sets the cylinder on the desk and goes back to de-heading the wall.
Dama gazelle, Amur leopard, white rhino, and now struggling with an unwieldy Cape buffalo. He tries stacking the buffalo on his pile but doesn’t get the balance right. The head slips left, its sharp right horn poking through his jacket and snatching a whorl of wool from the sleeve of his sweater. Somehow, missed his flesh completely.
But then the head slips again.
In slow motion, Lion watches his jacket rip elbow to wrist. Move, says the voice in his head, move now. Spinning clockwise, he tries to free himself from the fabric. Happens with a hard snap. The recoil drives the point of the horn into the underside of his forearm. A sharp pain on impact. His flesh tears as the mount skids farther sideways, bouncing from leopard nose to gazelle horn to hard wood floor with a thump.
Last Tango in Cyberspace Page 6
