Skinner

by Huston, Charlie

  He turns his head and looks at the door of the mausoleum, thinks about going in, but doesn’t get up.

  “I told her. Everything. It was. Easy. And. Comforting.”

  Jae has finished retying his laces. She moves on the step, into a patch of sun filtering through the branches of the horse chestnuts.

  “My mom was killed by a bee.”

  Skinner brushes his hands along his thighs, pats his knees once.

  “I’m sorry. Is what people say.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  Skinner nods.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Does that make a difference?”

  Jae thinks about it, her face turned to the sunlight.

  “No. Long time ago. Yesterday. It doesn’t matter. She’s dead and I wish she wasn’t.”

  Skinner scratches his chin.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Jae rubs the back of her neck.

  “What did your mom say?”

  Skinner closes his eyes, remembers the sound of the drawings on the walls of his mom’s office as they were rifled by the cold blade of air slicing in through the crack under the window. The smell of cigarette smoke. Trues. Blue package, plastic filter. He’d not known she was a smoker. She never smoked in the basement. And he never smelled her. Not that he would have recognized the smell of stale tobacco smoke in her hair and on her clothes. She chain-smoked one after another in the office. Overflowing ashtray. Disheveled. Hair more gray than black, twirled on top of her head and held in place by an arrangement of what looked like white enameled chopsticks. She was, her assistant had told him while he waited for her to return from a lecture, a wonderful teacher. She says things no one else says. That was easy for him to imagine. The lack of a verbal governor, typical of some autistics. And her knowledge was deep and wide. If you ask her about something she doesn’t know about, she goes and finds out about it and always has an opinion. She’s kind of awesome. You’re super lucky to have her for a mom. Then she’d come in from her class and told Skinner that she only had an hour and closed the office door and opened the window wider and started smoking.

  He opens his eyes.

  “She told me the results of the experiment. That in both cases. Control and experimental. The results were the same. The subjects became killers.”

  Skinner pulls his jacket tighter. It’s cold in the shadows of the trees.

  “She said that she was uncertain if this would have been the case if the experiment had not been interrupted. But it had been. She said she thought it was a good thing that my dad didn’t ever find out. About Haven and me. She said he would have blamed himself. But she didn’t. She said she was no longer a behaviorist. It explained too little. But she knew that conditioning worked. She said, If Haven can protect people, so can you. You’re not that different from one another, she said. She asked me about assets, how their value is set. I told her the contract sets the value. And she said I was wrong. She said the effort to destroy the asset dictates the value. The market, she said, sets the value. And she outlined a possible experiment. Behaviorist. In which one could condition others to recalibrate their value assessments. By making them horrified. Horrified. Was her word. Horror implies a strong and visceral reaction that cannot be controlled. I needed to make the cost of acquiring my assets horrifying to contemplate. If you feel like a monster, Skinner, she said, it is possible that you are one. Capitalize on that, she said. In your work. So I did.”

  He flicks a piece of gravel from the step.

  “And then. She told me. What she had learned. From raising two boys.”

  Skinner remembers her dragging hard on the butt of a True, her cheeks drawn in by the suction, smoking-wrinkles radiating from her lips as they puckered around that plastic filter tip that would not save her from the cancer that was growing already in her lungs. What I learned from raising two boys, she’d said, and then crushed out the butt.

  Jae leans forward slightly, looks at him, squinting against a flare of sunlight in her eyes.

  “What did she say?”

  Skinner shrugs.

  “Boys will be boys, she said.”

  Then she’d pulled up the cuff of her hooded fleece jacket, checked her watch, and stood up. Time for another lecture. Classroom of girls. Fathomable, somehow, in ways that her own children never had been. Perhaps because they were someone else’s. Or because her interactions were not skewed by the act of observing. No experiment. Just life. From a drawer in her desk she’d taken out a prescription bottle and swallowed two capsules, using the cold dregs from a coffee mug that read World’s Greatest Tenured Professor on its side. Circling the desk, she stood next to Skinner and looked at him. Frowned. Kissed the top of his head. And walked out the door. Leaving him in her office by himself, surrounded by the rustle of the drawings, hundreds of them. Stick figures, collages, watercolors, Crayola, pastels, an oil painting, several charcoals, ballpoint, felt marker, #2 pencil. Girls, as they pictured themselves, alone. All of them, bound by the edges of the pieces of paper, looking as if they were contained each in their own box.

  Skinner left the office. On the flight home he wrote out the maxim. And began to horrify people. Until he knew he could keep someone safe within the walls of that horror. The box of safety that only he could create.

  On the steps of the mausoleum, he looks at Jae in her patch of sunlight.

  “Boys will be boys.”

  Jae pulls up her knees, wraps her arms around them, rests her chin on top.

  “I know I’ve said this before, Skinner. But that is some seriously fucked up shit.”

  Skinner nods.

  “I recognize that fact.”

  Jae rubs her chin on her knees.

  “Where is she now?”

  “Dead. Cancer. Lungs. Everywhere, really. Ugly death. I didn’t go. But that’s what I hear. That’s what Haven told me. After he saw her.”

  Jae lifts her chin.

  “She talked to him, too?”

  Skinner looks at the door of the mausoleum.

  “Often. Haven says. But he’s a liar.”

  He stands, offers Jae his hand.

  “Take a look?”

  She pulls herself up.

  “If he’s in there, Skinner.”

  “He’s not.”

  “If he’s in there alive, I’m going to kill him.”

  “He’s dead, Jae.”

  She puts her hands in her jacket pockets.

  “Well fuck.”

  The key is inside the urn where it was meant to be seven years ago. Skinner expects nothing less than this. Terrence’s sense of humor showing. Little grace notes to be expected. The key opens the mausoleum door. Skinner pushes it open, wondering if he’s wrong, if he will find Terrence sprawled on the floor in grim imitation of that long-dead asset. Surprise! A rambling and marvelous joke. Shaggy-dog story for the spy set.

  Terrence is not inside. But his remains are.

  chemotherapy agents

  IN THE MAUSOLEUM Jae starts flipping through the five file boxes. On the cover pages of more than half the documents inside, stamped in translucent red ink, TOP SECRET. Nothing redacted. Terrence, the burner of all things paper, had been burning his employers for years. Saving, hoarding, filing, amassing. While she looks through the documents, Skinner is inspecting the rest of the contents of the mausoleum.

  Two passports in the names of people neither of them has ever heard of but who look exactly like themselves. Two sets of state-issued ID from Illinois. Credit and bank cards in the same names. Two fully charged BlackBerrys on prepaid accounts. Two fully charged laptops with pre-paid Wi-Fi contracts. Rollaway carry-on bags prepacked for a business trip. Several changes of clothes in vacuum-sealed plastic bags. Similarly packed trail mix, dried fruit, nuts, salami, crackers. A Leatherman and a small toolbox. A Garmin GPS unit. And packing materials in the form of tape, shipping labels, and Sharpies. A hand truck.

  Terrence, it seems, inte
nded for them to travel.

  Flipping through the files, many of them the originals of material that is in the USB dump, Jae finds Skinner’s continuing verbal inventory of their supplies beginning to manifest in the configuration. Business cards, included in the ID packets, for a systems engineering firm. Perigee Systems Consulting Inc. The clothes in the bags, lightweight, stain resistant. The hardy, practical phones favored by professionals everywhere. Maps start flipping open in her head as she flips the files. Warm climates, developing, boom economies, mud. Locations to suit the identities and supplies left for them. A limited number of candidates if China is eliminated. To the background now, those maps. Open the Critical Foreign Dependencies map from the USB surfaces. Brazil highlighted, underseas telecom cable landings and several mineral resources. Battery-grade manganese, niobium, etc. India. Chromite mines. Pharmaceuticals manufacturing, chemotherapy agents. All of it, cables, minerals, drugmakers, deemed essential elements in American security. Tenuous outposts of national interest. Strange borders.

  Favelas.

  Slums.

  Urban density.

  Her mind flings those at her. Something obvious. She’s missing it.

  Back to the beginning. West-Tebrum. Cyber attack. Modified Stuxnet worm telling a lube oil motor that it was circulating thirty gallons per minute when it was pumping nothing. Launched from servers in Ukraine and Yemen. Western European anarchists backed with money sourced from Eastern European gangsters and hackers. Chinese connection. Wet dream come true for private security companies that have been beating the drum on cyber warfare.

  Cross.

  Cross in Stockholm. Bilderberg. WTO. Cross the patriot. Terrence’s protégé. Cross on Terrence: deeply influential on my thinking. Terrence shaping Cross, and Cross maneuvering Kestrel out from under Terrence. The slight and swift bird of prey that was Terrence’s tool for shaping global security in the twenty-first century becoming Cross’s lobbyist-driven Beltway engine of profit. Terrence and Cross. Shaping. World. Cross and Terrence shaping the world? Numbers. A ledger. A very long string of digits on Cross’s bottom line. She balances on that long thin line. Her fingers still walking through the documents, flip, flip, flip, her brain wobbling its arms up and down trying not to fall from its perch. Fall now and start again. Something just ahead.

  A crime has been committed. First question. Who stands to gain?

  “Skinner.”

  He’s using the blade on the Leatherman to cut open a packet of trail mix. He stops. Looks at her.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Skinner. Cross.”

  “Jae.”

  Her fingers are flipping pages, eyes scanning, brain sifting, skipping, returning to Cross.

  “But. Cross.”

  “You sound funny.”

  “How?”

  “You sound like me.”

  She can’t stop flipping through the pages. TOP SECRET. Words, a few on each page, flickering by. Like flipbook animation. But telling a story in words. War. Inlet. Penultimate. Cause. Contraction. Tides. Resources. Extreme. Reliance. Population. Weaponized. Crater. Stockpile. Alternative. Satellite. Economies. Contraction. Drone. Urban.

  “Jae?”

  She starts to flip more slowly. Words accumulating.

  “Would it be paranoid of me to suggest. Not Terrence. But Cross? West-Tebrum. He has. Motive. Means. Opportunity. If it was a murder, he’d be convicted on that much.”

  Absorbing a bit more of each page now.

  Bio-disaster event horizon. Liquid metal fast-breeder reactor. Orbital mirror array. Al-Qaeda franchise structure. Black start. Neutron poison. Contraction operations. Open source prototyping. Population contraction. Foundational new-isolationism. Nonsupport as national security. Humanitarian overreach. Systemic contraction. Critical infrastructure garrisons. Corpse load.

  “Corpse load.”

  Skinner is looking into his bag of trail mix.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  He frowns at the nuts and raisins.

  “You like Cross for West-Tebrum?”

  She’s pulling a document from the box.

  “No. Sorry. Wrong. About that. I’ll be back soon. Wait here.”

  But she doesn’t leave the mausoleum, just walks to the corner, turns, plants her back there, slides down until she’s sitting on the floor. Eyes never leaving the papers in her hands. Reading the message Terrence left for her.

  The title of the conjecture is Hostile Climate Abatement: Endgame Strategies.

  It was on the USB, but Jae had skimmed past the title. One of many hundreds of references to disaster scenarios, her mind had touched on it and woven it into the configuration as a part of the background environment. It was, after all, just dumped in there with everything else. No hierarchy. Once past the Kestrel operation file and into the partition, it all looked like dead storage. A basement where your eccentric uncle tossed everything he didn’t use but couldn’t throw away. Opening the door after he dies (no surviving spouse or children), all you can think is, How the fuck am I going to sort through this shit? She knew, could feel, there was something in there that Terrence wanted her to find, but she couldn’t find it.

  Which was the point.

  If she couldn’t find it, neither could anyone else. And the only way even she could find it would be to follow Terrence’s directions. Secret directions. Whispered silently from beyond the grave. Slowly building the West-Tebrum configuration until only this piece could finish it. Until, picking it up and reading the title, with a click she can feel in her head, she finds the piece around which the entire configuration has been building. An absence that didn’t know its own shape until it comes into her hands.

  Go here. Now do that. See this. Ask. Look there. Up. Higher. There! Now back up. Further. Look out for the cliff! Oops. You fell. Start again.

  Until you end up in a mausoleum in a Paris cemetery looking through the dead man’s treasure of treasonously collected documents charting seminal thinking and strategies in regard to cataclysmic threats to national security.

  Hostile Climate Abatement: Endgame Strategies.

  Misleadingly titled, it turns out, as the conjecture puts forth only one endgame strategy. The essence of that strategy: contraction. The repeated word. So innocuous that she missed how frequently it was appearing. A simplistic metaphor is proposed in the body of the conjecture. A turtle. A clutch of eggs. In the face of a storm, a rising tide. The eggs cannot be moved. So the turtle buries them, moves to high ground, and contracts into its shell. The tide rises. Some of the eggs, tremendously valuable but not necessary to the turtle’s survival, are swept away. The turtle, high and dry and within the defenses of its shell, is unscathed. As for any other turtles on the beach, well, they’re none of the turtle’s business anyway. And if many of them should be lost in the tide, that’s just a few less turtles going after the same resources.

  So.

  Contraction.

  It’s a conjecture. Based on thinking. Not a formal strategy. Or proposal. Not a plan or a set of recommendations. Just a conjecture. Some thoughts, each page marked TOP SECRET, ruminating as to how the duly noted catastrophic effects of climate change (these things are not denied when the lights are out and all cats are gray regardless of political affiliation) could best be mitigated.

  Neglectful population reduction.

  The seas will rise. The storms will worsen. Drought and flood and famine. And with them, disease. Warfare. The worst of it regional. Isolated. Undeveloped. Just developing. Poor. Poorly resourced. The places where exposure to the world is greatest. Where food and clothing and shelter are daily challenges. The shitty places. Disaster World.

  In the end, the conjecture sums up, having already failed to take decisive and timely action to avert a hostile climate, nation-states with the means to contract and to harbor their own essential populations and critical infrastructures will find that it is further inaction that will save them until such time that the demands and burdens of
the global population have been reduced and put back in balance with the available natural resources.

  A timeline for this happy outcome is proposed. A framework of two centuries. Within which the reader is asked to imagine, yes, burdens put upon their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, but a very real possibility that their fourth generation of descendants will reap the rewards generously bequeathed them once a not unstartlingly large number of people, in places they will never have to look at, are dead.

  When Jae does finally move she walks to the door of the mausoleum, pries it open, and stands crying in the fading sunlight.

  “It’s a meme.”

  She blows her nose into a tissue from a travel pack Skinner has found in one of the bags.

  “Terrence created a genocide meme.”

  Back in her corner, the conjecture where she dropped it, open on the floor. She flicks a finger at it. Something to be abhorred.

  “He wasn’t trying to. It was Terrence. You know. No thought is so terrible that you can’t say it out loud. The specific thinking shows up in a bunch of stuff in the USB. But it’s old. That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t quite get it. It’s old thinking. Old for Terrence. As far as he was concerned, climate change was a hot topic in the seventies and eighties. He was sounding that trumpet when he was still at the CIA. By the nineties, he had moved it to The Land of Foregone Conclusions. Too late to fight climate change, time to start thinking about what to do when it happens, how to survive. When he first brought up contraction theory, everyone thought it was grotesque. Can you imagine? Suggesting that the most realistic way to deal with climate change was just to embrace the fact that billions would die and the earth would sort itself out. He was Doctor Strangelove.”

  Skinner has one of the laptops open. Online. In its case he found a large envelope. Still unopened.

  “But he wrote the conjecture.”

  Jae nods.

  “For Kestrel. Cross encouraged him. He was always encouraging Terrence to codify his ideas. He was creating a database of intellectual property for Kestrel. Preparing for the day when he would take over and Terrence wouldn’t be there anymore. No more in-house visionary, but his thinking was locked up in the vaults to be pillaged for years to come. Hell, Terrence was predicting a new cyber security front in nineteen eighty-five.”