Last Tango in Cyberspace

by Steven Kotler

  “I can sleep in too.”

  “Sleep as long as you want. Tajik’s a night owl. Usually his crew opens up for him. If you want to find Tajik at the shop, he doesn’t show up until four. If we get out of here by two, we can check out the birds and still get there before he arrives.”

  “Didn’t you get tossed out the last time you visited that store?”

  Shoulders back, spine straight, chest out: “I am Lorenzo Boldacci, son of Alessandro and Margarette Boldacci, and I will not be fat-shamed by little big thugs in red satin. Nor will I truck with an argument, Lion Zorn, I’m coming.”

  “Figured, but don’t blame me if you get shot.”

  Lorenzo shakes loose a couple of Marlboro Reds from a soft pack, passes one over, keeps the second. Zippo click and flick.

  “How you doing otherwise?” After their smokes are lit.

  “You know.”

  “The girl’s still on your mind.”

  “Oh no, she’s definitely a woman. But yeah, a little on my mind. Also, other things.”

  “Like?”

  “Like Arctic told me they wanted a meeting with Muad’Dib to discuss turning Sietch Tabr into an autism drug. But the shit that’s gone down—seems too surreal for a Big Pharma play.”

  “Better living through chemistry, Kemosabe. Big Pharma’s pretty surreal.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Maybe I’m not. Say you’re right. Say this is about something bigger than an autism drug. Bigger how? If you had access to a drug that expands empathy—what would you do with it?”

  Lion nods toward Hank. “I’d be tempted to put it in the water supply.”

  “Agreed,” says Lorenzo, a shadow passing across his face, “but from what you said, Arctic’s all about the money. Where’s the money in dumping an empathy drug into the water supply?”

  “Don’t know,” taking a drag on his cigarette.

  “Maybe it’s the wrong question. Maybe it’s not the before, it’s the after. Putting Sietch Tabr in the water supply would seriously shift culture, so where’s the money in that shift?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “And?”

  “And that pisses me off,” says Lion. “You’d think, being an em-tracker, predicting future revenue streams is sort of my thing.”

  “But there’s a woman on your mind.”

  Lion sighs in agreement.

  “Gentlemen,” Lorenzo calls to the rest of the band, “we’re gonna open with the heartbreak set. Our friend requires the medicine.”

  Nods all around, except from Hank, who has had a couple of drinks, which makes him mean, which means he’s got something to say: “Em-tracking, isn’t that like perpetual heartbreak?”

  “Shut it, Hank,” snaps Lorenzo, not wanting the same argument.

  Lion appreciates the gesture, but he knows Hank’s prejudice is an ancient one, human superiority, dominion over the beasts, and so fundamentally deep in our thinking that rarely do we notice.

  He crushes his cigarette into an ashtray.

  Small favors: Hank lets it go, and the band heads toward the stage. Lion moves from standing in the greenroom to sitting in the beer garden. They kick off with a country-punk version of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” into a couple of twangy Social Distortion numbers, “99 to Life” and “Ball and Chain,” and then one of his favorites, “Goddamn Lonely Love” by the Drive-By Truckers. A sentiment, reaching for his third beer, he currently appreciates.

  Snatching his glass a little too quickly, Lion sloshes liquid onto the table. The spill is heading for his lap. As he grabs for a napkin, something by the spiral staircase grabs for his attention. An attractive woman? A bit of waitress commotion? Then it snaps into focus: a little big guy in a red satin shirt, staring at him while talking on his cell.

  Lion starts to get to his feet, but the man notices him move, hangs up the phone, and heads down the stairs before he’s vertical.

  “What the hell?” asking the air, beer dripping onto his pants.

  Easy, Zorn. Got to be a ton of guys in Malaysia with red satin shirts. He wipes up the beer, but the paranoia doesn’t clean so easily.

  No longer does he feel safe in the crowd.

  Threading his way back through the tables, Lion trades the exposure of the beer garden for the enclosure of the greenroom, now empty save for the poly-tribe woman with the glittering stars.

  “You’re Lion,” she says, giving him a quick wave as he enters. “I’m Changchang.”

  Chinese, his first guess, under all the makeup. “Nice to meet you.”

  “I heard what Hank said, you’re an em-tracker?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Never met one before.” Toying with a vape-pen shaped like a nuclear submarine. “What’s it like?”

  Once again, he doesn’t know how to answer, tries: “You ever met a cow?”

  “No,” she says, giving him a weird look, like meeting an em-tracker is not exactly like what she thought it would be.

  “You should,” says Lion. “Pretty amazing animals. They form lifelong friendships, hold grudges against anyone who treats them badly, cry tears, just like us, when they mourn their dead or are separated from loved ones. And they’re about as smart as a five-year-old human.”

  “No way-way.”

  “Way-way,” he says, but not smiling. “When I walk through your world,” gesturing around the room, “you’re wearing a leather bodice, those are red leather couches, and my best friend Lorenzo,” nodding toward the band, “is wearing leather cowboy boots. You see style. I see what you see, but I also feel what a cow feels, the sadness, the cruelty, there isn’t exactly a word for it.”

  She takes a big hit off the nuclear sub, exhales a mushroom cloud. “That sounds, ‘xing ten’ is the word in Chinese.”

  “Xing ten?”

  “It’s the heartache that comes from watching those you love in terrible pain.”

  Sipping his beer, “That sounds about right.”

  Down in the park, the vendors are packing it in for the night, feeding leftovers to a pack of street dogs who have assembled for the ritual.

  “The harder part is knowing where it leads,” he explains.

  She raises an eyebrow.

  “Cows are emblematic. We’re in the middle of the Sixth Great Extinction. Species die-off rates a thousand times greater than normal. All this human superiority, where has it led? We’ve fractured the web of life. Ecosystem services are shutting down. Scientists tell us we’ve got about two generations left before the slide becomes irreversible.”

  “That’s some seriously dark shit.”

  “Moo,” says Lion, suddenly too sad and too drunk to do anything but head straight for bed.

  THE BIGGEST NOTHING IN HISTORY

  Awakened by the hotel phone, Lion discovers his hangover is not nearly as bad as he’d imagined it would be. Then the phone rings a second time and he changes his mind. Like someone wrapped thunderclouds around his forehead. It takes until the third ring before he actually locates the receiver.

  “Uh-huh?”

  It’s the front desk telling him a package has arrived. The fourth favor, the last one he needed from Lorenzo, and right on schedule. Call Masta Ice and ask Balthazar Jones to overnight the snuff container he’d originally found under Walker’s desk to his hotel in Malaysia.

  “Sir?”

  He glances at the clock, tells the clerk he’ll be down in an hour, and goes back to sleep. Three hours later, he actually manages to make it to the front desk. While the clerk retrieves his package from the back room, he texts Lorenzo, telling him he’s down in the lobby.

  “Here you are, sir,” says the clerk, passing over a small black box, MASTA ICE printed on the side.

  Lion takes the box, thanks the clerk, and walks over to an armchair. He opens the package, lifts out the snuff container, and deposits it in his sling-pack. There’s a short note beneath: Brother, I know you asked me to be discreet, but Arctic throws me a
lot of work. Jenka called. I had to tell him about Tajik Tabbara. Thought you should know.

  “Crap.”

  He tries to figure out how much that matters, but before he can decide, Lorenzo, in a cowboy hat, jeans, and dusty shit-kickers, and Changchang, now free of pancake makeup, saunter into the lobby.

  “You are fighting for the biggest nothing in history,” says Lorenzo, passing him a cup of coffee.

  “Talking about Arctic?”

  “Apocalypse Now.”

  “Same thing,” taking the coffee.

  “Hiya, Lion,” says Changchang, then, swatting Lorenzo’s butt, “See ya, tiger,” and then across the lobby and out the front door.

  Lion looks at Lorenzo, says nothing. Lorenzo looks at Lion, says nothing back. Both sip their coffees.

  “Bird Park?” asks Lorenzo, after a while. “Rhinoceros hornbill?”

  “I have no idea what those words mean.”

  “But you will,” starting toward the front doors. “Mind a walk? We can grab some grub along the way.”

  Lion falls in beside him. “Sweat off my hangover, puke up some Malaysian street food, why not?”

  “You forgot meet a gangster.”

  “I think we already met.” Lion fills him in on the red satin shirt from the night before.

  “So what,” asks Lorenzo, “he tracked me back to the hotel after he threw me out of Allah Bling?”

  “Dunno. When I saw him, he was staring at me.”

  “Nobody knows you’re here.”

  “Yeah,” says Lion, “and the way I heard it, it was a lone gunman.”

  From a vendor outside the hotel, Lorenzo buys a couple of falafels. They eat and stroll. A main thoroughfare, suburban colonial with a sprinkle of Miami Beach, gives way to a warren of side streets dotted with soot-stained high-rises. A couple more blocks and the side streets open up again, becoming a red-bricked sidewalk surrounding a Moorish castle like a moat. Intricate archways, a trilogy of domed spires, turrets in beige brick. Lorenzo says something about the sultan who once owned the castle, but Lion is only half-listening. The other half is wondering about why Jenka called Masta Ice and worrying about why Penelope vanished.

  Too many maybes in the mix.

  “You armed?” he asks, interrupting Lorenzo’s monologue.

  “You ain’t digging the sultan story?”

  “Are you?”

  “I’ve got my dad’s Ka-Bar tucked in my boot. No idea what to do with it, but a crazy fat white dude in a cowboy hat with a knife, if they’ve seen enough Westerns…” Shrugs.

  They pass a sun-cracked tennis court and a weedy soccer pitch, both empty and surrounded by tall wire fences. A few blocks later and the fences become tall and wooden. They reach the edge of the KL Bird Park. Lorenzo pays their admission in local currency. Lion sees oversized bills in cartoon colors.

  And through the main gate.

  Looking around, Lion’s caught off guard by the size of the park, like someone planted a rainforest in the center of a city, though, of course, it was the other way round.

  “This place is huge,” he says.

  “Eighty acres, like two hundred species of birds.”

  As if on cue, a pair of peacocks walks past them, while a half dozen parakeets ruckus it up in a nearby tree. Above everything, a thin mesh netting.

  They walk in silence, a gray asphalt path threading between tall trees, until Lion hears a noise above him and double-takes. A large black bird, a long white beak, zebra-striped tail feathers, and, atop its head and nearly as large, a curved orange horn.

  “What,” pointing, “is that?”

  Lorenzo tracks Lion’s finger to an overhead branch. “The reason we came.”

  “A rhinoceros hornbill? I get the name now.”

  “The casque,” says Lorenzo, gesturing to the horn. “It’s prehistoric. Hornbills descend from hadrosaurids.”

  “That’s a lineage nearly sixty million years old.”

  “If you say so.”

  Lion sips his coffee and stares at the hornbill.

  “I can tell you,” adds Lorenzo, “the bird is red-listed. Without parks like this, it’d be gone in a generation.”

  “Are you trying to make me feel better?”

  “Yeah, Changchang told me you kind of landed on her. Something about cows and not liking my boots.”

  “I guess I did.”

  “But I heard you, back when you mentioned my boots the first time, that show in Venice.”

  “Yeah?”

  “These are new boots. Lab-grown leather.”

  “They look like your old boots.”

  “Because I tied ’em to my truck and dragged them up gravel roads for a few miles.”

  “You’re so punk rock.”

  “Stuck in my ways.”

  Then the hornbill flies out of the tree and lands by Lion’s feet. He glances up at him, with a look like they’ve met before, and he’s a little miffed that Lion doesn’t remember.

  White eyes, dark pupils, and holding his gaze.

  ALLAH BLING

  The front entrance to Allah Bling in the distance: an ornate Moroccan door beneath a curved white awning. It’s tucked down a side street, beside a bank and a former government building that’s since been partitioned into an open-air café and a high-end electronics store. As they pass the store, Lion notices a tall stack of Sega Genesis Classics beside crates of lychees. Rugged red skin, hiding flesh white and sweet. Reminds him of the fruit-and-video-game-console display he saw in New York. Those Xbox 360s and Asian pears piled up near the corner of Houston and something. Could this be some new poly-tribe thing? A first ripple showing up as nothing more than an odd pairing of wares?

  A couple of bangers on mopeds drives slowly past them, bandanas across their foreheads, leather jackets. They park their bikes by the curb. One heads down the block, another into Allah Bling.

  Lion points at the store, “Looks like they’re open for business.”

  “Open for something,” says Lorenzo, but he’s not smiling.

  They approach the edge of the awning slowly, feeling not exactly comfortable with their decision. A few feet from the front entrance, Lion decides to restate the obvious. “I’m not sure this beach is safe to surf.”

  “I’m sure,” says Lorenzo. “It’s definitely not safe to surf.”

  “You could wait here.”

  “I could,” says Lorenzo, stepping past him, under the awning and into the shop.

  Lion shakes his head and follows.

  Two steps inside and the Nag Champa hits high in the nostrils and musky sweet. Persian carpets, tribal shields, and dim lighting. A long glass counter displays bejeweled chains; a tall glass bookcase holds shiny watches. Across the back wall, Lion recognizes the name of God spelled out in Arabic script—gold letters packed with gems—and behind it, spray-painted on the wall itself, a balaclava-wearing, Kalashnikov-toting “freedom fighter,” with an iced-out Rilkean bar code tattoo clearly visible.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” he tells Lorenzo, his voice barely a whisper.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “The Rilkeans aren’t violent,” says Lion, pointing at the mural, “or Islamic—”

  But before he can finish that thought, a wiry Middle Eastern man in his early thirties struts out of the back room. Pencil-thin mustache, white wraparound sunglasses, white old-school Puma tracksuit, and something herky-jerky in his demeanor.

  “That’s him,” whispers Lorenzo.

  Lion takes a step toward the counter. “Tajik?”

  “Yo, yo,” says the man, spreading his arms out wide, his pupils pinballing. “What is the up, sex-ee. Gonna slay all the Lisa in da hizzy with da Allah Bling.”

  Beside him, Lorenzo mutters something, maybe “Gotta be fucking kidding me.”

  “Yo,” says Lion, deciding to play along. “You may not remember. I’m Kevin Clark. Your brother introduced us, in Dubai.”

  “My brother?” says Tajik, jab-stepping toward them, his mustach
e twitching, something speedy in his eyes. “Got beef?”

  Lion takes a step back.

  “Guy’s gakked to the gills,” whispers Lorenzo.

  Tajik pounds a fist on the counter. “Wanna get smashed?”

  Angel dust? Injectable crystal? Not good, thinks Lion, not good at all.

  “No beef,” he says.

  “What you think, bro? Think you VIP? Gonna be RIP.” A mad grin displays a neat row of teeth filed canine sharp, diamond studs embedded in the front pair. “Bro, ’course you’re VIP. Welcome to Allah Bling. How you know my bro?”

  “You’re Tajik Tabbara?” says Lion, still attempting casual. “Your brother is Nassir?”

  As he’s speaking, Lion notices movement behind him. Risks a quick glance. And does not like what he sees.

  While he was focused on Tajik, the moped riding banger and the guy from the hotel bar, the little big dude with the red satin shirt, must have slipped into the room and taken up flanking positions in the back corners of the store.

  “My brother is Nassir,” says Tajik, dropping out of MTV gangster and into something colder and less cinematic. “And I’m Tajik.” His hand darts under the counter and comes back out with a gun. “But you’re not Kevin Clark.”

  To his left, there’s a glint of chrome. Red satin shirt producing a combat shotgun, and pointing it directly at them.

  “What you are,” says Tajik, “Lion Zorn, is F-U-C to the T. Fuct. Do you know that expression. From the 1990s. Fuct.”

  “I like your plan,” says Lorenzo. “I think it has tremendous potential.”

  “All we’re looking for is information,” says Lion, holding up his hands, trying for reasonable.

  Tajik starts to laugh, not really a human sound. “But that’s not what Jenka’s looking for.”

  Lion blinks.

  Tajik sets his gun on the counter and removes a small glass vial from his left pants pocket. “You know,” he says, “my Malay brothers,” nodding toward the red satin shirt, unscrewing the top of the vial and lifting free an eyedropper, “don’t always appreciate the Chinese. I disagree on that point. I’ll tell you why. Research. Great learning culture. Gangsters, too often, get hung up on tradition. Not the Chinese. The Tong, they have a market research division. A combat science arm. Know what they learned?”