Nelson rifled through the pockets. He ignored his wallet and grabbed, instead, a pack of gum. He chewed a piece while both Randy and Tim stared. Then he pulled the gum wad from his mouth and said to Randy, “Consider yourself lucky you’ve got someone willing to chew your gum for you.”
“Dude, you’re not gonna…sick.”
“You want to save your tooth, or not? ’Cos I guarantee you’ll rip it right out of your head if you try to chew it yourself.”
“Does this seriously have a chance of working?”
“It might. All they’d do at the dentist is wire your teeth together so the loose one stops moving until it tightens up in its socket. This’ll hold until morning—as long as you don’t keep poking it with your tongue.”
Randy gave an “Oh, all right,” eye roll.
“Lay back.”
Randy pushed the recliner to full-sprawl, and winced as Nelson slung a leg over his lap to get in good and close. The sweatpants rode down in back, dragging at Nelson’s boxers. More tattoos. Butt cheek. Crack. Tim’s pulse roared in his ears and he wondered if he might actually faint—and whether he could claim dental phobia with any plausibility if he did.
“Don’t worry.” Nelson braced his elbow on Randy’s shoulder. “I’ll still respect you in the morning.”
“Ha ha.”
Tim closed his eyes for a moment when Nelson shoved his fingers into Randy’s mouth. It was too much. Sensory overload. But then he realized he’d never forgive himself if he didn’t watch.
A lock of Nelson’s hair had fallen forward. The tip was sun-blond, fading to sandy almost-brown by the roots. It tickled the corner of his mouth. “Don’t chew it,” he told Randy. “Don’t poke it. Don’t get it spitty if you can help it. Just let it keep your tooth as immobile as possible.”
Randy said, “Okay,” which sounded more like, “Ho hey,” with Nelson’s fingers in his mouth, pressing the gum into place.
If only, Tim thought, someone had knocked out one of his teeth.
“Bite down,” Nelson said. “But when you open back up, hold the gum in place and make sure it stays stuck to your upper teeth. How’s that feel?”
“Okay.”
“Now forget it’s there.” Nelson dismounted.
Randy sighed in resignation. “Minty fresh.”
Nelson tucked his hair behind his ear and hiked up the sweatpants. Which rode back down again the moment he let go.
“How did you know to do that?” Randy asked him.
Nelson smiled, mostly to himself. “You really want to know?”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
Tim envied their light, bantery tone. He was sure if he’d had the balls to join the conversation he’d talk too loudly. Or stammer. Or say something profoundly stupid.
“I had a cadaver head in grad school. Advanced physiology.”
“What the hell were you studying to be? Frankenstein?”
Nelson laughed. “Ten points to you for knowing that Frankenstein was the name of the doctor and not the creature—and using it correctly in a sentence.”
They went on like that, Nelson telling Randy about the head—male, Caucasian, gray-haired, strangely asymmetrical and a bit jaundiced; he’d needed to share it with three lab partners since he was majoring in biology rather than medicine—and Randy piping in with questions that made Nelson open up and reveal such fascinating things about himself.
And Tim stood there and said nothing.
Randy made talking with Nelson look so easy. He wasn’t nervous. Of course not. He was straight. And he didn’t think having Nelson Oliver straddling him and thrusting fingers into his mouth ventured into fantasy territory.
Tim wished he’d had the foresight, and the backbone, to sneak a photo with his cell phone. Nelson turned to Tim, then, and Tim had a moment of panic where he wondered if he’d somehow managed to confess his urge aloud. But all Nelson said was, “Where’s Javier?”
“Fire escape.” There. He’d managed not to stammer.
Nelson shuffled to the window with the cuffs of the sweatpants covering most of each foot, and called out, “What was that video you were playing? Was that shot outside the job fair?”
“Yes. I suppose.”
“Come back in and play it again—I want to get a better look. Or are you claustrophobic or something?”
The window opened. “I’m fine.” Javier’s chest brushed Nelson’s as he slipped back into the room, and Tim felt another pang of envy. Was it Tim’s imagination, or had everyone but him managed to touch Nelson?
Javier sat at the computer and Nelson held the back of the office chair and leaned over his shoulder. No, definitely not Tim’s imagination.
Javier moused and hit a few keys, and the video began to play. “Full screen?” he asked.
“No, leave it. The resolution’s crisper when it’s not zoomed in.” Sirens. Shouts. Screams. “Hold on, did you see that sign?”
Javier paused the video. It lagged. Slow on the side of the server where it was hosted, Tim thought. Not his connection.
“Go back,” Nelson said.
“Yes, I know.” Javier repositioned the playhead and the video buffered quickly, and restarted.
“There. Pause it th—you missed it.”
“I know what you’re trying to see. Give me a second.” Javier backed up the video again and tried to catch the frame where a white tagboard protest sign flashed by, but all he got was a pixelated blur.
“Right-click on the video and download it,” Tim said. “We’ll have better control if it’s not streaming.”
“Cool,” Nelson said. Tim basked in the approval. Nelson reached around Javier, one hand on each side, and said, “I’ll just check my email quick while it downloads.”
Tim gaped. How had he not yet managed to find himself in the path of Nelson’s nonchalant groping? Javier slipped out of Nelson’s arms, stood up, and said, “Take the chair.”
“You sure? I’ll just be a second.” Nelson flashed a crooked smile over his shoulder at Javier, then turned to the computer, bent over the back of the chair as if to prove the point that he really didn’t need to sit down, and began typing. “There’s never anything in here but bad jokes from my manager and off-brand dick pills.” He pulled up an email account and scanned a few messages. His shoulders tensed. He closed the browser, and his easygoing manner fell completely away. “I gotta go.”
“What?” Tim said. “You can’t go now.”
“Dude,” Randy said. “It’s totally not safe out there. Some fucker with a shotgun tried to carjack us just a few blocks from here.”
“That was a semiautomatic,” Tim snapped, “not a shotgun. And it wasn’t a carjacking. He didn’t take the truck, did he?”
“He took my hundred dollars.”
Nelson went to the window and peeled back the newspaper, though there wasn’t anything he could see that would have helped him get his bearings. “We’re on Mott just off Grand,” Tim told him.
“Right. I just need to get to my apartment on Baxter.”
Nelson lived in the heart of Chinatown, while Tim’s apartment was right on the fringe? They were practically neighbors. Tim felt lightheaded.
“Don’t go alone,” Randy said. “I’ll go with you.”
“No, no, someone should stay with Marianne,” Tim said. “I’ll go.”
“It’s still dangerous out there,” Javier said. “I should go, too.”
Nelson pulled the fold out of the sweatpants waistband and let them fall around his ankles so he could step out of them. Tim did his best to keep his eyes in his head while Nelson bent to step into his dress slacks. He seemed totally unconcerned, both about changing in front of everyone else, and about who, if anyone, would venture outside with him.
“I’ll drive,” Tim said.
“It would take you longer to park than it would take me to walk,” Nelson said. “Plus it’ll draw less attention.” He peeked out the window again, though he couldn’t see much of the street from where he
was. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t be a dumbass,” Randy said. “Let Bones over there walk you home.”
Tim could practically feel the unflattering shadows thrown by his frame beneath the overhead light as a tangible thing on his skin. Thankfully, though, there was a distraction that saved him from also feeling Nelson’s eyes on him at that very moment.
“You’re leaving?” Everyone turned to find Marianne standing in the bedroom doorway in one of Tim’s T-shirts, which hung halfway to her scraped knees. “Now? In the middle of the night? Are you nuts?”
“Something’s going on at home. I need to get over there—see if I can help.”
“Fine,” Marianne said. “Give me five minutes to get dressed. You go? We all go.” She went back into the bedroom to pull her things together without waiting to see that Nelson had acquiesced. Nelson shifted his weight from foot to foot as if five minutes was too long to wait.
Randy stood and pulled on his sport coat. “You know she’s right,” he said—and then the computer made a loud beep that cut off whatever else he might have wanted to add.
“The video’s done downloading,” Tim said.
Nelson dropped down into the chair, navigated to the download folder, and double clicked the file name.
It filled the screen this time. People surging, jostling, pressing up against each other while the camera struggled to remain stationary, but couldn’t manage to keep from being jerked around. A businessman in a one-sleeved suit coat smashed a cab window with a hunk of asphalt, then someone threw a punch at him, and the camera jerked away and settled on a different part of the crowd. No less chaotic. A cop beat down a slight, longhaired protestor with his riot shield.
Nelson groaned. “That could’ve been me.”
Marianne drifted up, dressed now, as well as she could be in her heelless shoes and torn skirt, and looked over his shoulder. He stopped the frame on the protest sign, and even Randy stood up to get a better look at it.
Child Killers
“I told you they found out about those factories in Mexico,” Marianne said. “Some of the workers were twelve and thirteen years old. They locked them in. Total fire hazard. Especially the way manna plants are always blowing up.”
“That hasn’t happened in over five years,” Nelson said. “Now that they know ventilating the fermentation gasses won’t affect the consistency if they do it after the coagulation process gets going.”
“Maybe the Voice of Reason did another update while we were asleep,” Marianne suggested. “I’ll bet they saw this video. Maybe they’ll know what it means.”
“Who?” Nelson asked.
“No,” Tim told her. “I checked like fifteen minutes ago. Nothing new. We’ll look again later—right now, we’ve got to get going.”
Tim’s guests pulled together whatever few possessions they’d managed to bring with them. Tim shrugged on his army surplus jacket, slung his battered messenger bag over his shoulder, and stuffed a roll of toilet paper, a sock full of emergency cash, his netbook, and a few pounds of manna into it. What he really wanted to bring was the portable 2TB backup drive, but he suspected it would call too much attention if he unhooked the firewire and disconnected the power supply. The flash drive, though…that was too precious to let out of his possession. He pulled it from its USB port—the warning about not ejecting the disc properly had been disabled years ago—and tucked it next to his cell phone and wallet.
Nelson transferred a folded piece of paper from the sweatpants to his slacks, then went through the rest of his pockets—gum, wallet, keys—and a few business cards fluttered to the floor. He ignored them. Tim felt his heart beat faster.
It made sense for Tim to be the last one out. He needed to lock up, after all. So while everyone else was turned toward the door, he grabbed one of the cards and glanced at it—Nelson T. Oliver, PhD, food science / manna specialist—then pocketed it.
It might not be the most satisfying way to get Nelson’s phone number. But it would do.
Chapter 12
It was cold and damp outside. The sky, pre-dawn dark. The streets felt too quiet, like they were holding their breath, waiting for a new surge of panic like the burst of violence outside the job fair. Only this one would be worse, because it would be premeditated, fueled by greed and revenge. The desire to loot. To destroy.
Javier wanted to believe that human beings were intrinsically good—and that it was mainly circumstance that drove them to destroy one another without morals, without conscience. But maintaining that belief was a challenge.
The five of them walked in a tight group, with Marianne in the middle and Randy, the largest, bringing up the rear. Nelson still looked woozy from his medication, but it was clear from the way he’d gone quiet that whatever happened at home was serious, probably more serious than he’d let on, judging by the way his manner had become abruptly sober.
If Nelson had carried himself more like he did now—quiet, focused—rather than acting like a horny teenager, Javier could very well have fallen for him back at the ill-fated job fair. Javier wasn’t sure what that said about himself.
Canal Street seemed safest, wide and obvious, with fewer places for desperate men armed with guns or baseball bats to descend on them. The streetlights were lit, but traffic now seemed sparse, even for the predawn hour. They turned down a narrow side street only at the last possible moment, once they were well into Chinatown.
Despite the fact that the immigrants here lived in apartment buildings rather than corrugated metal lean-tos, the third-world smell wasn’t that different from the shantytowns of Caracas. Piss and garbage. Smoke. Fish. The fish bodies rolled in on trucks filled with ice in the wee hours of the morning, where they were traded in the back rooms of the jewelry exchanges and the bail bonds shops. Manna might be nearly as cheap as its packaging, but that didn’t mean the older refugees ate it. The food of their culture was all that remained of their identities. Ironic, when those who stayed behind in Asia were now subsisting on rice-flavored manna.
Nelson led the group to a dark red doorway covered in graffiti four or five layers deep, and he pressed the intercom. A woman’s voice answered in an Eastern language. “It’s Nelson,” he said, “I’m home.” Before he could get his key in the lock, the door buzzed open.
“You live with an actual Chinese family?” Randy said—he seemed genuinely surprised.
“Vietnamese. It’s…well, it just worked out that way.” He took the narrow stairs two at a time. Everyone kept up with him. There was certainly enough adrenaline coursing through all their veins to make it easy.
“You speak the language?”
“Me? Not very well. It’s all vowels. And whenever I try, I manage to screw it up and say something rude. They’ve got like a hundred pronouns and I always pick the worst one.”
On the third floor, he stopped in front of a door with gang symbols scrawled on it in scuffed marker, and pushed the key into the lock. Before he turned it, he said, “Maybe you guys should wait in my room. Grandma’s not used to seeing so many towering non-Asian guys. Especially guys all beat up and bruised.
“Now I’m curious,” Randy said. “When this is all over, you gotta have me over for a beer and a baseball game.”
“It’s a date.”
Nelson opened the door, and a pre-adolescent boy hovered in the hallway, shifting anxiously, much the way Nelson had when he was eager to leave Tim’s apartment. Javier doubted he was solely Vietnamese, and not just from the American jeans and T-shirt he wore or the way he carried himself. His hair and eyes were dark brown, but his features were a blend of Asian and Anglo. “Did you find her?” He spoke English without an accent.
“I just got your email.”
“But I sent it last night. What were you—?”
“I had a migraine.” Nelson took him by the shoulders, turned him, and encouraged him to walk up the hall so everyone else could squeeze in. Randy locked the door behind him.
“Who’re all
these people?” The boy strained to look back over his shoulder as Nelson herded him in. He regarded Javier’s eye patch with a mixture of curiosity and awe that wasn’t unlike Nelson’s strange fetishizing appraisal at the job fair.
“Introductions—friends, Bobby. Bobby, friends. Look…I know you have a lot of questions, but let’s sort a few things out and try to track down your mom first. Okay?”
Nelson pushed open the door to a bedroom and waved toward it. “I’ll be right in,” he said, without looking to see what anyone was doing in his room. Instead, he propelled Bobby to the end of the hall, which opened up into a larger living space. Javier hovered in the doorway, and cocked his head to see. A larger living space, yes, but filled to capacity. The walls were hung with shelves full of candles and statuettes, and a ten-speed bike hung from the ceiling. Voices filtered in, a woman speaking Vietnamese, then the boy translating, Nelson answering, but they spoke quickly in hushed voices, so Javier couldn’t really discern anything other than what he’d been told.
“So d’you suppose that’s his kid,” Randy mused, “or what?”
Javier turned toward Nelson’s room. The bed, a desk, and a dresser with a huge tube TV on it filled the floor space. Tim was inspecting a leaning stack of DVDs that was one good stomp away from falling over. Randy and Marianne were looking at an inkjet printout, a photo of Nelson and Bobby with pretend noses and mustaches superimposed over their regular features, laughing. Of course not, Javier almost said. But given Nelson’s age and the fact that the boy was half-Anglo, it was certainly possible. And why else would Nelson be living with a Vietnamese family three generations deep? “What difference does it make?” he said. It sounded snippy, even to him.
“He just didn’t strike me as the daddy-type,” Randy said.
“Not really,” Marianne agreed. “Childish himself. Or maybe child-like. That’s probably a better description.”
The Starving Years Page 9
