Skinner

by Huston, Charlie

  The doctor prods her legs with his finger.

  “Okay?”

  She can feel the pain deep inside her leg, but not on the skin. She doubts it’s going to get any better so she nods yes.

  He also nods, picks up scalpel.

  “Okay.”

  He did his initial examination without painkillers, listening to the pulse in both femoral arteries, feeling the extent and tightness of the swelling in her thigh, asking her to extend her leg; but cleaning the entrance and exit wounds requires a series of lidocaine injections. The exit wound is ragged, but none of the tissue appears to be necrotic, so he doesn’t trim it. The entrance wound shows black flecks of gunpowder. Result of being shot at such close range. He’ll use the scalpel to scrape them away.

  Aasif talks throughout. Using what little time he has, and helping to distract Jae.

  “I was at school, you know. And Terrence was looking for someone educated. Someone from the slums, but educated. Very special education. I was interested mostly in chatting with engineers. Other places. Western. Classes at the university were quite good, but slow. I am the son, you see. And in my family, the only son. You know how this works?”

  He is looking at the curtain next to Skinner, his own son beyond.

  “Everything for the sons. This is our culture. Right, wrong. This is what it is. What he wants, the boy gets. Eats first, plays first. Birthdays, oh my. Everything. Rich family, poor family, everything for the son. Especially poor family. My father cleaned shit. To raise his son’s caste, he lowered his own. So his son could be educated and raise the family’s caste. This is what I understand irony to be. I will clean shit for my son to be an engineer so I will no longer clean shit. Also so that I do not have to clean shit. So I wanted to work harder at school. I am not unusual in this. You ask what men are afraid of here, they are afraid they cannot support their families. Afraid. Not concerned, worried, stressed out. They live in fear of this. Because if they cannot, the next step is the slum. And if you are already in the slum, the next step is living on the street. And then the garbage dump. And then you are dying and your whole family is dying with you. I was not special wanting to work harder. Simply I was very good at it.”

  The doctor is done scraping the wound. He cleans it again with a mild soap, rinses it with saline. Blood is still welling from inside, but very slowly. He makes a sound in his throat, the deep contentment of a well-fed cat. He likes how the wound looks, and starts unwrapping sterile gauze pads.

  Aasif is touching the pens in his smock pocket.

  “There was a small financial award I found out about from an online friend in Texas. Very obscure, an energy company in the US. This was not something I knew how to investigate. Who they were or what they did. An energy company searching for new markets. So they were asking engineers, electrical, civil, nuclear, practical people, students, what were the concerns of their developing nation areas. Slums especially. And what kinds of solutions would we see moving forward into the brave new twenty-first century. A contest sort of thing. My proposal was one that was selected. So much talk about suitcase nukes. I said, Why not a suitcase reactor? The technology from submarines, okay? One such reactor to power a slum like Dharavi for forty years and still extra power to use for other things. Modular, you know. When it has been used up, the fuel is removed in a module and a new fuel module put in. You can do this many times. So I got some money for my idea and thank you and this man from the company started to talk to me in chats and messaging.”

  The doctor is done bandaging Jae’s wound. He looks at her bare legs and nods. The pants he scissored off of her are in a waste bin in the corner along with her socks and underwear. Her boots are bloody, but usable. A sheet is draped over her lap. He raises a finger, wait, and slips out through the curtain.

  Aasif looks at his watch, frowns.

  “I thought there was a job for me with this company. But that was not so. This man, he wanted to talk about my home. Dharavi. The practical. If there was a reactor, how would it work? Not just design theory. Wires. Cooling water. Infrastructure for such a thing. And he asked me about the future and what I wanted. And then we were becoming friends.”

  He winds his watch.

  “And then again one day he wants to show me some things. In person. He is here, unexpected, at the university he finds me so that he can show some things to me. That is how I find out that my friend has created an idea that lets people think about letting everyone I have ever known die. Contraction.”

  He taps the face of his watch.

  “And then he asked me what I was going to do to stop this from happening. How I was going to stop the world from ignoring my home so that when they started saying, Oh, things are so bad now it is too late for us to help you and we can only help ourselves, so that when they started saying those things, we could say, Okay, we will help ourselves. We have power to help ourselves. It was stupid, though. The money was impossible. The reactor did not exist.”

  He looks up from his watch.

  “But you know my father died run over by a truck full of shit on his way to clean shit. The job he took so that I could raise our caste. And I was the son. It was my job to make it better. Things are stupid, you know. I cannot tell you how stupid. I am stupid. So I became Shiva. I reached out into the world and began to talk to the people Terrence introduced me to. And I started to rewire Dharavi. I brought my degree back to the slum. My mother was not happy. She was betrayed by the son she had sacrificed for. Her husband had cleaned shit and died in shit. And I came back here to make the wires better for everyone else, but she had to live in the same shitty hut she had always lived in and then I married a little dark girl from around the corner. So my mother died. And I rewired Dharavi. And I built a network of people to go with my network of wires. You have to know everyone. The ones living in the gangwar, the cops, the Sena, Congress, water goons, electricity goons, the old men in the panchayat assemblies, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, local bureaucrats from the BMC, and all the people in their homes when I came to change their wires and they thought I was there to steal their electricity. I did it because if I did not do it then I would be contracting, too. Looking only at how I could protect what was already mine. It’s not there, the world. Do something else and be normal. That bullshit. So I went outside my hut and wired as much of the world as I could. For everything else there was Terrence.”

  The doctor comes back with a pair of deeply stained but recently laundered green cotton shorts. His own. He holds them open and helps Jae to slip them up her legs and past the bandaged wound. He is slender but they are still too big for her. He has a solution, a length of twine for a belt. She ties it around her waist.

  Aasif is pushing himself up from his tiny seat.

  “Everything else was money. Terrence said getting money was only hard if you did not want to get caught. And he said that getting caught would be what happened no matter what.”

  He smooths the front of his smock.

  “He was very good at using people, Terrence. Putting them together in combinations that produced what he wanted. Criminals, spies, politicians, businessmen, revolutionaries.”

  He points in the direction of #1 Shed.

  “Some of the investors in Atomenergoproekt’s reactor project, they are not legal and aboveboard. You know? The prototype cannot get approved. Even in Russia. So much money being lost every day. A field test is needed. Terrence was vague when speaking to them, I am certain. But he had money from the credit card scams he had set up. And he had sold weapons to insurgents and sold the insurgents to governments. And he had blackmailed United States government officials and sold the blackmail evidence to lobbyists. Oil lobbies. He had millions and millions and millions because he did not care who caught him. As long as he did not get caught until just in time. So he gave money to the Atomenergoproekt investors, men of shady type, oligarchs, cash-loving, and they helped to see that the reactor would be moved to someplace where it could be stolen and taken away for a fi
eld test where regulations would not interfere and there would be tremendous publicity for their product.”

  He shrugs.

  “But if you want to steal a nuclear reactor and its fuel rods you must also create a distraction to cover the noise that will make. The computer worm he bought for West-Tebrum was almost as expensive as the reactor. So much noise and confusion was needed to hide the stolen reactor. To hide that it had been stolen. Secret chatter in Russia, coded messages about a missing reactor. Imagine if the world knew it was missing? Everyone would have looked. But because of West-Tebrum, the lookers were too busy to be bothered. When your country starts hearings on how such a thing could happen, a nuclear reactor slipping across borders, across a war zone, and no one in your security knew about it, they will see how obvious it was. If they had only looked. But too late now. Too late.”

  Jae has pushed herself up on her elbows, the change in her heart rate starting a new throb in her leg. She and Skinner still are not looking at one another. Too much. No time for that now. When will there be time? Never? She swings her legs over the edge of the table and the flash of pain almost blacks her out but she shakes it off and holds up a hand.

  “And what’s the plan when everyone finds out the reactor doesn’t work?”

  Aasif smiles, nods.

  “Yes. Yes, that is good. Terrence said, he said you see everything. Good. Well. When they find out the reactor does not work, they will kill us then.”

  He steps to the curtain.

  “Come with me, please. I will show you our real secret.”

  As they pass through the living quarters, they pause for a moment to watch the TV, where Aasif can be seen standing in front of the reactor and delivering his message. The doctor’s family look from the TV to Aasif and point, Look, look, you’re on TV!

  They’re hanging by a thread, these people, and most of them have no idea.

  In #2 Shed, Aasif shows them the secret that makes the big lie possible.

  “General Electric makes them, 747 engines. That is what it is, inside. More complicated than that, but at its heart it is a fifty-megawatt generator run off the power from a 747 engine. GE LM6000. Brilliant engineering. Excellent product. Horribly inefficient.”

  It’s small, smaller than the cargo container that brought Dharavi its reactor. If they had the proper filters mounted on the air intakes, and scrubbers for the exhaust, it would be at least twice as large, but stripped bare it’s no larger than a motor home, mounted on a firm cement foundation, a cluster of a dozen thick cables running out of one side to a junction box that spews a hundred thinner cables through an opening into a hut next door, where they begin their journey of patching and repatching throughout the slum. The entire unit is dwarfed by the fake cooling towers that stand next to it, exposed to the sky now that the shed’s tin roof has been peeled away to allow steam to escape. The steam itself is in part the product of the LM6000’s exhaust being pumped into the water tank below the sham towers, and in part created by the heating elements also inside the tank.

  “Heat is a tremendous difficulty.”

  Aasif is pointing up at the steam rising from the towers.

  “They will look to see if we’re generating enough heat from the reactor. At Number One Shed we can heat the underside of the tin roof and that will be enough to hide that we are in fact safely at full throw, no reaction under way at all. But cooling towers must be exposed. So they will look here. The LM6000 stays hidden under a section of roof, but its own heat helps with the illusion. And it produces the power they see balanced over the BMC grid. Very good solution. I am proud.”

  He waves them to the door and away from the noise of the generator.

  “We didn’t have time. The window to receive delivery on the reactor was so small. We could not hide it here, keep it a secret. And our foundations. The LM6000 can stand on a housing foundation, but the Hitachi would rip itself out of the ground. Our cooling tank, also not ready. We were not prepared for the water flow we need to cool the reactor. The towers were not finished. Very little was ready, but the reactor was coming. And the software is very hard to run. We used video capture of screenshots to display while we made the video. And inside Number One Shed, a recording of a generator running, played back over a PA. Very loud.”

  As they walk down the lane, Raj and his mother and sister rejoining them, Jae leans on Skinner and on an old rattan cane the doctor gave her.

  “What about spectroscopy? What happens when they analyze the chemical contents of the exhaust plume? They will.”

  Aasif nods.

  “And what if they analyze the sound of the generator in the video recording and realize that it is a loop? And what if our man in the water department cannot hide the fact that we are not diverting enough water to cool a reactor? And what if they find the taps we have on the gas lines to feed the LM6000? These are our vulnerabilities. We have only a little time, however long it is, before our contrivances are discovered. We must bring the reactor online in earnest before then. Or they will come in and they will kill us.”

  There is a liveliness in the lane. Shops have opened in the evening air. The helicopters have gone, and, while the soldiers and police are still on 90 Feet Road, no one feels as threatened. Spices are on display, meat is being cooked on small grills, families have come out. From open storefronts and homes on the lane, every TV can be seen showing Aasif in the reactor shed or someone talking about what it means and what must be done. The world talking about Dharavi. They wave at him, point, as if he is a Bollywood star and not the crazy boy who always was changing the wires. Bushels of bright vegetables, incense bundles, open sewage ducts running into the alleys, kids playing, animal heads on display at the butcher. Lit up, despite the current flowing from the LM6000, by the soft glow of oil lamps.

  It is a beautiful evening, and Jae leans against Skinner more than she needs to.

  Aasif says a few words in Tamil to someone and then leads their small party down one of the alleys toward #1 Shed.

  “Weeks. We need at least four weeks before they find out. Six weeks would be better. Two months would be best. The LM6000 has been running for over a month. We’ve been able to power Dharavi that long, fine tuning the wiring, but it was erratic until we balanced the load, hiding it on a factory transformer at the edge of the slum. Now it is perfect.”

  He stops walking.

  “I have a lot of work to do. So now is the time to talk.”

  He looks at his watch.

  “How will you get us more time?”

  It is a dull shock to perceive this final checkmate of Terrence’s. Pushed all over the board, square to square, one instant a pawn, the next instant queened on the back rank, free to ravage from behind the lines. But suddenly her knight is being taken.

  Terrence. You son of a bitch.

  She shakes her head.

  “No. Terrence was wrong about this part.”

  Aasif taps the face of his watch.

  “He said someone would come. A list of message boards and mail drops. A protocol for what messages to look for. How to respond. What Raj was doing, my Little Shiva. Terrence said someone would answer and then come. There was more than one point to the West-Tebrum attack. A distraction, we needed that. Obviously. But Terrence said we needed more, A catalyst, he said. To begin a reaction that would bring you here.”

  Jae feels stupid.

  “No.”

  But Aasif is not looking at her. He is not talking to her.

  Aasif is talking to Skinner.

  “Terrence said that you could get us more time.”

  He puts a hand on his Raj’s shoulder.

  “He told me what to do.”

  He presents his son.

  “Skinner, this is my son, Rajiv. Will you make him your asset?”

  wonderful scam

  THEY GO BACK to the shopkeepers’ street.

  Oil lamps. Darkness coming on. It smells like faraway places. There are red stains everywhere on the ground and the walls,
it’s only paan juice, spit up by chewers, but Skinner thinks about Haven’s blood on the wall of the hutment.

  Outside their family home, Skinner and Jae stood with Raj and his mother and baby sister. Haven’s body was gone from inside. Skinner’s own clothes, ruined by his brother’s blood. He washed his hands at the doctor’s office, but it is there under his thumbnails, reddish black. At the broken door, he looked at the young mother and her baby. The bullet hole in her sari. She doesn’t know that she shot his brother. There was a man with a gun in her home, and there were children. Some problems are uncomplicated. He wanted to tell her what a marvelous shot it was. She has no idea. Perhaps she’s good with a gun. A natural. The genius father and dead shot mother; what remarkable people they will be, Raj and the baby named Tajma, if they grow up.

  The family went inside, work to be done, Jae and Skinner came here.

  He misses carrying Jae. But she leans against him as they sit on a low step, just a step, leading to nothing, at the edge of the lane outside of an unopened shop with a front stained blue-green with mold. He looks at her leg, slight bend in the knee, red and swollen and bruised. Skinner looks up. The darkening sky. They are watched. So many pictures being taken right now.

  He looks at the red-stained ground.

  “By tomorrow night it will be impossible to get out.”

  Jae pokes her bandage, hisses with pain, pokes it again.

  “Can you get them more time?”

  He pulls her finger away before she can hurt herself again.

  “If I have an asset, Jae, I have to keep it safe.”

  He looks at their hands.

  “But I work for you. I can’t end that contract myself. And I can’t protect Raj if I stay here. It will need to be done from outside.”