The Tindalos Asset

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

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  For Twisby and the Posby

  In Memory of Harlan Ellison (1934–2018)

  Visionary. Hero. Mentor. Friend.

  &

  Julius “Jack” Theodore Cage (1963–2020)

  Lost family.

  The stars turn, and a time presents itself.

  —Margaret Lanterman

  . . . out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

  —Cormac McCarthy

  1.: Paint Me As a Dead Soul

  (Los Angeles, January 17, 2018)

  Here’s the scene: Ellison Nicodemo, dope sick and all but naked, comes awake to dusty terra-cotta sunlight filtered through tattered chenille curtains and to the staccato notes of a music box and to the smell of someone else’s brand of cigarettes. The light and the heat are a wrecking ball in her head, and for some number of seconds she cannot recall where she is or how she got there. She can only in the dimmest, most rudimentary sense recall her own name. But then the pieces fall mercilessly into place, even through the shock of this rude awakening, even through the junkie haze, and even through the murderous Los Angeles morning sunlight seeping in despite the drapes. She squints at the old Sears digital clock radio silently ticking away the minutes from its place on the low table beside her mattress on the floor, and blocky red numerals inform her it’s 10:13 a.m.

  “It’s a goddamn oven in here,” says the Signalman, and he mops at his face with a handkerchief. “You know that, right? I couldn’t get the heat to shut off. Your thermostat’s busted. And your TV. That’s busted, too.” He closes the lid of the music box, sets it down, and lights a fresh Camel. Through tearing, stinging eyes, Ellison Nicodemo perceives him as a ragged demon in a cheap black suit and shiny cheap shoes, his face slick with sweat, dark sweat stains at his armpits. He’s pulled one of the kitchen chairs over to the corner that passes for her bedroom and he looms above her, tall as tall can be, gaunt as a scarecrow.

  “How long have you been sitting there?” she asks him, then sniffles and wipes at her nose.

  “A while,” he replies. “Long enough I’m working up a heat stroke. I tried to open a window and let some fucking air in, but they’re all nailed shut. Did you do that? Did you nail your damn windows shut?”

  “What are you doing here?” she asks, instead of answering his questions. She turns her head away from the barbarous sun, coughs and clears her dry, sore throat, breathes in the rancid mélange of scents filling the rented room above a Koreatown combination locksmith and shoe-repair shop—spilled beer, sticky spoiled takeout clinging to Styrofoam boxes, heaps of dirty laundry, candlewax scabs, vomit stains, a transvestite prostitute’s cheap perfume, the musky ghost of sex, and her own sour sweat. Down on South Ardmore, the morning traffic rumbles and bleats at itself like an impatient flock of gasoline-powered sheep creeping slowly towards the hollow promise of greener pastures. Then Ellison realizes that she’s alone on the mattress.

  “You didn’t hurt him, did you?” she asks.

  “You mean your tranny hooker?” the Signalman asks. “No, I didn’t hurt him. I paid him and then I sent him on his merry way. I don’t rough up boy whores. Jesus. Just what kind of man do you think I am?”

  That’s a trick question, if ever there were one, she thinks, and she rubs at her protesting eyes and sits up, her bony shoulders and spine pressed against stucco painted the delicate pale blue of a robin’s egg.

  “Your television’s busted,” he tells her again.

  “It’s not my television,” she says. “It came with the place. It was broken when I got here. But if you’re making a list, the refrigerator doesn’t work, either. Can you at least light me a fucking cigarette?”

  “Yeah, sure,” says the Signalman. “Here, you take this one.” He leans over and sets his Camel’s damp filter between her chapped lips, then lights another for himself. Ellison Nicodemo takes a long, soothing drag, praying to the deaf, indifferent god of all atheists that this is just a nightmare and in a moment she’ll wake up and it won’t even be dawn yet. The pretty Mexican boy will still be sleeping there next to her, breathing softly, only almost snoring, still with her because she promised to pay for the whole night. She’ll lie there on the mattress listening to him sleep, listening to the city, and watch the light from the neon signs turning the windows all the colors of the rainbow.

  Surrender Dorothy, indeed.

  “Well, does the shower work?” asks the Signalman.

  “You still haven’t told me what you’re doing in my apartment. And if you broke that lock, you’re paying for it.” She turns her head back towards the offending sun, takes the cigarette from her mouth, and squints up at him again. He looks a lot older than she remembers, older and more weary, more broken down by time and alcoholism and by gravity. There’s more grey in his thinning hair, more lines etched deeply into his face. He looks haggard. He looks almost done for. It’s only been five years since the last time she set eyes on him, but the Signalman seems to have aged at least a decade and a half in the interim.

  “You don’t look so good,” she says.

  “You been anywhere near a mirror lately?” he asks, smoking and sweating and staring straight ahead at the dead TV, like maybe by sheer force of will he can Lazarus the thing back to life. “You know, you said you were going to Europe. When you left the organization, that’s what you said, how you were going away to Europe to sort shit out and get your head screwed on straight. Prague, wasn’t that what you told me? Didn’t you say you were going to Prague?”

  Ellison shrugs and takes another drag on the Signalman’s cigarette. “Yeah, and I almost made it to the airport,” she tells him, “but you know how it goes. The best laid plans and all that happy shit. Should’a, could’a, would’a, but didn’t. If wishes were horses, beggars would be rodeo clowns.”

  “Well, I didn’t know,” he says, and she gives him the side-eye and laughs.

  “Yeah, right. You’re telling me Albany hasn’t had someone watching me all this time, keeping track, just in case?”

  “Just in case what?” he wants to know.

  “Just in case anything,” she says. “You’re telling me there’s been no surveillance, no bugs, no tails, no drones, no unmarked black fucking vans lurking about?”

  “That’s not what I said,” replies the Signalman. “But I’ve kinda had my hands full ever since you left, and I didn’t know. That’s what I said, that I didn’t know. You claimed you wanted out, so I figured you didn’t need me looking over your shoulder anymore. Way I figured, she’s a big girl wearing big girl shoes and she can take care of herself. But clearly, I was mistaken on that count.”

  Ash falls from the tip of her cigarette onto her bare belly, and she brushes it away, but it leaves behind a charcoal smear on her skin. “It is what it is,” she tells him. “Don’t you dare go turning all white knight on me.” She sits up a little straighter and reaches for one of the amber prescription bottles littering the table by the mattress. There’s a small
pharmacopoeia lined up there—opiates, opioids, benzos, a few hits of high-test MDMA from a well-connected dealer over in Little Bangladesh, a few tabs of ketamine from another dealer in Silver Lake, half a vial of fairly decent cocaine, and so forth and so on. She pops a childproof cap and shakes two white Vicodin out into her palm, just something to take the edge off until she’s awake enough to fix. Until the Signalman finally spits out whatever’s on his chest, gets it out of his system and goes away and she can proceed with the perfected monotony of her day. Her mouth is almost too dry to swallow the pills, but she manages. Just.

  “I need to take a leak,” she says and sets her cigarette down on the rim of an overflowing Disneyland souvenir ashtray balanced precariously on the edge of the small table, next to the clock radio.

  “Well, I’m not stopping you,” says the Signalman, but he stands up and scoots the chair aside, like that’s exactly what he was doing. Then he offers her a hand, and she takes it. The Signalman pulls Ellison Nicodemo up off the dirty mattress, and she has to steady herself against the wall for a moment, waiting for the spins to pass, before she can stand on her own, much less make the long trek all the way to the bathroom.

  “When’s the last time you got around to eating anything?” the Signalman asks, glancing about at the discarded, grease-stained wrappers from taco trucks and Korean barbeque joints. “And I mean something that actually counts as food, mind you, something that wasn’t measured out in milligrams and pressed into a pill?”

  She ignores the question, because he doesn’t want to hear the answer.

  “That’s what I thought,” the Signalman mutters, only half to himself.

  She makes it the rest of the way to the toilet all on her own, so there’s that to be proud of, and then she closes the door behind her, turns the latch, pulls down her underwear and sits, and she pisses for what seems like a very long time. Like piss gremlins came while she was sleeping and filled her bladder with the contents of MacArthur Park Lake, like she hasn’t pissed in weeks. Her nose drips and she wipes it on the back of her hand, then wipes her crotch with the last few squares of toilet paper from the last roll in the apartment. Sweat falls from her forehead to spatter the pink-and-white mosaic of hexagonal ceramic tiles at her feet. She gets up, flushes, and tries to make it out past the cracked mirror above the sink without catching a glimpse of her own wasted reflection, but she fails.

  “You fall in?” the Signalman calls impatiently from the other side of the bathroom door. “You might be interested to know I ain’t got all morning.”

  “How about you just give me a goddamn minute,” she mutters, not quite loudly enough that he can hear, and she stands there staring back at herself, at the strung out, diminished ghost of the woman she was that last long-ago time she and the Signalman talked. She turns thirty-one in April, but could easily pass for the roughest sort of forty-five. Her skin looks more like wax than flesh. She’s lost so much weight it’s not hard to count her ribs or see the outline of her sternum between her small breasts, and there are sunken hollows beneath her cheekbones. Her eyes look bruised, as if someone’s been beating her on a regular basis, and her teeth feel loose in her mouth. Her shoulder-length, dishwater-blonde hair is a snarled mess that would make a fine home for a family of homeless mice. There are track marks on both forearms and between her toes and fingers.

  And then there are the other scars, the ones that have not followed from bad habits, neglect, and self-inflected wounds. Ragged lines of proud flesh, still vivid pink even after more than half a decade, emerging from beneath her hairline and running down either side of her neck, continuing along her shoulders and arms, her ribcage, her waist and hips and thighs, the outsides of her legs, all the way south to her ankles. They look sort of like someone tried to carve a tiny railroad into her skin. There’s another set on her hands, beginning at the tips of her little fingers and ending at her wrists. Seven years ago, the agency offered her the best cosmetic surgeons that money could buy. Seven years ago, she said no and walked away. Now she’d make a fine addition to any passing sideshow, a freak to point at and pity and be grateful that’s not you up there. But the scars are hers, and she owns them, same as she owns the pain and her addiction. Masking them with surgery would only add another lie to the fold.

  Ellison Nicodemo turns on the tap and splashes her face with a few handfuls of lukewarm water that stink of rust and chlorine. She imagines the Signalman scowling and telling her, “You look just about near enough to dead, it’s a holy wonder they haven’t already come and carried you away to the boneyard.”

  Maybe I am, and they have, and this is Hell.

  She screws the top off an almost empty plastic bottle of Listerine Cool Mint and swishes and spits into the stained porcelain bowl, then gets her hands wet again and runs her fingers through her hair in a half-hearted attempt to persuade it to behave.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she whispers to that other her in the mirror. “What do you care what he thinks?” When her reflection doesn’t see fit to answer either question, she spits again, and this time there’s a little blood in her saliva. She washes it down the drain, unlocks the door, and goes back out to face the Signalman. He’s returned to his chair and is staring at the dead TV again.

  “This thing with you and the television,” she says, “what’s that all about? Have I missed the end of the world again or what?” She goes to the kitchenette and opens the lid of the blue-and-white forty-eight-quart Coleman chest sitting on the floor by the useless refrigerator. Most of yesterday’s ice has melted, but the beer inside is still cold enough. She takes out a can of National Bohemian and holds it against her forehead and cheeks for a moment.

  “You want a beer?” she asks.

  “Maybe I didn’t make myself clear, how you need to shake a leg.”

  “You made yourself clear,” says Ellison.

  “You know, I can remember when you stayed sober as a judge until noon.”

  “Do you want a beer or not?”

  And then the Signalman relents, says what the hell, and she takes out a second can and closes the lid of the cooler and goes back to her nest of sheets on the mattress. He takes his can and cracks it open, and she opens hers, and for a few moments they sit quietly drinking the cold Natty Boh, not talking. She finds the Public Enemy T-shirt she wore the night before and pulls it on, hiding her pale breasts and her ribsy abdomen and the strange train-track scars. The shirt is ragged black cotton, much loved, worn so many years now that it’s worn thin and worn entirely through in some spots. Printed on the front is the silhouette of what might or might not be a cop in the crosshairs of a gun.

  Finally, it’s Ellison Nicodemo who breaks the silence.

  “For a minute there,” she says, “I thought maybe you were going to meetings again,” and the Signalman shakes his head.

  “Well, I ain’t, so you can stop worrying your pretty head over that. And I’m not going to lecture you, either, so you can stop fretting about that, as well.”

  “What are you doing here?” she asks for the third time.

  “Right up front,” he says, “I want you to know that it wasn’t my decision. Truth is, I advised against it. When they brought me your file, when I found out about”—and he motions at her and at the squalor with his beer can—“I told them you were clearly in no shape for active duty. Hell, I told them I doubted you were up to walking and chewing gum at the same time.”

  She looks up at him, then looks down at her feet. There’s a dirty Band-Aid wrapped around her left big toe, but she can’t remember how long it’s been there or what it’s covering up. “I quit,” she says. “I was permanently discharged. I have the paperwork in a drawer over there.”

  “And we both know that no one’s ever really, truly quit. You know permanent means, on a good day, provisional. And you also know that what Albany wants, Albany gets, and they get it one way or another, by hook or by crook or courtesy a few enhanced interrogation techniques.”

  She takes an
other swallow of beer, and now she’s staring at the dead TV screen, too.

  “I’m not good for shit,” she says. “I haven’t been clean in over two years.”

  “Yeah. I know. So does the company. They just don’t care. It just doesn’t fucking matter.”

  She finishes her Natty Boh, crumples the can, and tosses it at a low heap of empties that has accumulated on the other side of the room, a lopsided aluminum talus slope.

  The Signalman frowns and sighs and watches her like a disappointed parent or a heartbroken lover, and the truth is, he’s been a little of both to her. He says, “We don’t have time to dry you out. So you’ll have what you need. I’ve seen to that. You’ll have better than whatever garbage you’ve been shooting. And when it’s done, if you want rehab, you’ll get the best. And if you don’t want rehab, there’ll be no pressure, no guilt-tripping. I’ll bring you right back here and let you get on with—whatever you call this.”

  She starts to reach for the cigarette she left in the ashtray, but it’s burned down to the filter. So she finds her pack of Chesterfield Reds and lights one.

  “And if I say fuck off and refuse this generous offer?” she asks.

  “Then they’ll hurt you, and when they’re done hurting you, they’ll still get what they want, which is something else you already know. You do not need me going into the particulars. You know the particulars. On more than one occasion, you yourself have participated in the particulars.”

  “Yeah,” she says around a mouthful of smoke. She reaches down and pulls off the Band-Aid. The toenail’s missing.

  “Jesus Harold Christ,” the Signalman grumbles, looking disgusted, leaning over and examining her foot. “It’s a wonder you don’t have fucking gangrene by now.”

  “Shit. I don’t even remember doing that.”

  “Well, maybe I don’t have time to get you clean. But I do have time to have you checked out. Get some fluids and antibiotics in you. A goddamn tetanus shot, for fuck’s sake.”