We Live in Water

by Jess Walter

  So I simmed the detective and made plans to meet him outside my doctor’s office. I stepped out into the cool air, chest still burning from the radiation, when a tall gray guy in a long suede jacket stepped forward. “I’m Mick.”

  “Owen.”

  Mick was in his fifties, with a high forehead and severe blue eyes. I hadn’t explained much in my tweet, but he didn’t seem to want details. I followed him to an antique red hybrid and we climbed in. I asked where he found gas for this old car and he just smiled at me, like it was proof of his investigative powers.

  It was a flat rate, he explained as we drove, five thousand up front.

  I pulled out my iVice to debit him the five grand but he shook his head. “Cash,” he said.

  So we went to the nearest KFC-Bank of America, where I was pre-approved for the highest food debits. I lied on the application and said it was for dinner at a nice restaurant. Mick counted the five grand, folded the bills, tucked them in his waistband, and started driving. He pulled a small bottle of homemade hooch from beneath his car seat and handed it to me. I took a drink. Vodka.

  I pulled out my iVice to show him the pictures of Marci, to tell him about her, but he held up his hand. “Save it till we get there.” We drove quietly along Westlake.

  “Get where?” I asked.

  He chuckled at something. “Hey, what’d one zombie say to another?”

  I stared at him. “What did you say?”

  “What . . . did one zombie say to the other?”

  “Is . . . that a joke?”

  “Dystopia? What dystopia? Dis da only ’topia dere is.”

  I stared at him.

  “You do know what a dystopia is, right?”

  I said I did.

  It was dusk as we approached the Fremont Bridge. Even before Fremont became Z-Town, the construction of the Aurora Tunnel had cut down on traffic crossing into Fremont. Now, it was six o’clock and there were maybe a dozen cars on the road. The bridge’s cross-braces were covered with holo-boards warning about the dangers of Replexen abuse and reminding people it was illegal to transport “cats and other pets” into Fremont, and finally there was the big black and white sign: “WARNING: ENTERING HYPO-ETE CONCENTRATION DISTRICT.”

  Mick held out the bottle again. “Couple looking for an affordable condo in Seattle calls a real estate agent,” he said. “Agent says, I know a place, five rooms, city views. Bad news, it’s in Zombietown. Good news? It’s very pet-friendly.”

  I took a drink of his vodka, my hands shaking. The streetlights in Fremont were tinted blue—it’s calming for them—and this gave everything a strange underwater glow, like an aquarium. There were few people on the streets—zombie or otherwise, the buildings nondescript, simple brick storefronts. We turned and started back toward the water. We passed Gasworks Park, and I imagined I saw figures moving in the shadows of the hulking works, flashing matches, bits of skin.

  “How many zombies does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Mick asked.

  I closed my eyes. “Please,” I whispered.

  “UUUUNNNNGGG!” he said.

  We turned again, and again, and back again, down a street with no lights, and I had the sense Mick was driving serpentine, to make me disoriented. Finally, we pulled up in front of a dark four-story building.

  “This is it,” Mick said.

  I looked up at the building.

  “You got those pictures of her?” he asked.

  I held up my iVice.

  Mick nodded and got out of the car. I followed him. We stood in front of the building. I could hear yowling in the distance. I shivered as I stared at the dark building in front of us. “You haven’t asked me a single question about Marci,” I said. “What makes you think she’ll even be here?”

  Mick shrugged. “What’s the worst part about having sex with a zombie?”

  I put my hands up. “Please. No more jokes.”

  “Burying your cat afterward.”

  We climbed the stairs and pushed open a heavy door. We came into a dimly lit foyer, closed heavy doors on either end. A wall-mounted eye-cam pointed at us. Mick held up two thousand-dollar bills. He crinkled them. Then he opened his coat for the camera, I guess to show that he had no weapons. Then he elbowed me. I did the same, opened my coat.

  After a moment, an electronic lock clicked and one of the doors opened and a muscular young zombie kid in baggy shorts, a sweatshirt, sunglasses, and flip-flops came through. At first I thought it was Brando, but, of course, it wasn’t.

  “Follow me,” the zombie kid rasped.

  I looked at Mick. “Aren’t you coming?”

  “What’s the difference between a zombie and a bagel?” Mick asked. I just stared at him. “UUUUNNNNGGG!” he said again.

  The zombie kid grunted a kind of laugh. “Good one, Mick.”

  Mick shrugged. “It kinda works with anything. UUNNGG!” Then he turned and went back outside. I watched him go, wondering if I should turn and follow him out. Instead, I hurried after the zombie kid. It was cold in the long hallway, clammy. Closed doors lined the walls; strange sounds came from the rooms. At the end of the hall, we came to a set of doors that opened on a huge ballroom—a lounge of some kind, heavy timbers and ornate molding, like an old social club, an Elks Club maybe, smoky, filled with the movements of people on overstuffed leather couches and chairs—and as my eyes focused I could see a bar at the front and a couple of zombies serving drinks. Everywhere else, white-skinned women in scanty clothing lounged around, talking to men like me.

  It was a brothel.

  “This is a mistake,” I said to the kid.

  The zombie kid turned and at first I thought he was staring at me, but he was looking at someone over my shoulder. “Dina,” said the zombie kid.

  “You have pictures?” a woman asked from behind me.

  I turned. The woman, Dina, was in her thirties, with shimmery black hair, pale skin, her eyes that cloudy blue, but somehow not entirely gone zombie yet, or just controlled in some way. Like the kid who had led me back here. In fact, there seemed to be a whole range here—not just zombies and nonbies, but people who seemed to function under the effects of the drug.

  “You have pictures of your wife,” Dina said again, her voice just betraying the slightest hint of Hypo-ETE gravel.

  “My girlfriend,” I said.

  She nodded, and smiled warmly at me.

  I pulled out my iVice and fumbled with it. “I don’t know if she’s . . . I mean . . . you don’t think Marci is . . .” I glanced around at the zombie prostitutes all around us. One of them took a man by the hand and led him away.

  Dina the zombie madam reached out and steadied my hands. “It’s okay. Relax.”

  Finally, I found a holo of Marci and me in our apartment—it was when she had short hair, but it was a great picture, her bemused chestnut eyes, long lashes, high cheekbones. The 3D holo appeared blurry rising from my iVice, but then I realized it was my eyes. I wiped the tears. Dina smiled. “She’s so pretty.”

  I nodded and pulled the image back into my iVice.

  “How long ago?”

  “Two years. She left . . . two years ago.”

  Dina nodded again. She took my hand. I looked down at our hands, her white skin against my sun-scarred hand. She led me across the darkened room. I felt the breath go out of me. I was terrified I might see Marci here, terrified I might not.

  We arrived at one of the couches, in the corner of the lounge, where a short-haired zombie girl was sitting, staring off blankly. On the table in front of her was a hypodermic syringe with a needle, and a bag of powder. “Is that—” I pointed at the drugs on the table.

  Dina said, “It makes some men feel better to know what it’s like.”

  “Oh no,” I said, “I don’t want that.” Then I looked closely at the girl on the couch, her brown hair and eyes, her high cheekbones. I reached out, tilted her chin up. “You know that’s not Marci,” I said.

  “Of course it is.”

  �
��No, it’s not even close. This girl’s ten years younger than Marci . . . at least three inches shorter.”

  “Marci,” Dina said, and the zombie on the couch looked up at me.

  “See. It’s her.”

  The zombie girl looked back down again.

  “Joe,” I said, and the girl on the couch looked up again.

  Dina looked upset with me. She turned to face me, cocked her head, and took me in with those clear, translucent eyes. There was a hum to her, a vibration—like a dropped guitar. “What is it you want?”

  “I told you. I want to find my girlfriend.”

  She smiled patiently. She reached out and took my hand again in hers. “No. What do you want?”

  “What?” My throat felt raw from the radiation. “I just want to talk to her.”

  “About what?”

  “I’m sick,” I said, and at that moment, the burning in my chest was overwhelming. “Cancer. I just found out a few weeks ago. Ozone sickness. Third stage. My application for gene therapy was turned down so they don’t know how much time . . . I wanted to see Marci and . . .” I couldn’t continue.

  Dina stroked my hand with her slick white hand. “Apologize,” she said.

  “What?” I felt the air go out of me.

  “You wanted to apologize? It’s been two years and this is the first time you’ve come here,” the black-haired woman said. And as she said it I knew it was true, and I wasn’t sure anymore that the burning in my chest was coming from the radiation.

  “You didn’t even look for her,” Dina continued, her voice entirely without judgment. “In fact, when she left, you were sort of . . . relieved. Weren’t you? Relieved that she left before it got bad.”

  I tried to say no, but I couldn’t speak.

  “You would never have said it out loud, but you knew where it was going and you didn’t know if you could do it. Take care of someone so . . . sick.”

  The room swirled as the pale woman spoke.

  “Your anger was useful. You told yourself that she wanted this; that she chose this; that she chose to throw her life away.”

  I nodded weakly.

  “But now you know . . . don’t you?”

  I could barely see her through my teary eyes.

  “Now . . . you know what we know.” Her voice went even lower. “That nobody chooses. That we’re all sick. We’re all here.”

  “I . . .” I looked at the ground. “I just wanted to tell her . . .”

  “Tell her what?” Dina asked patiently.

  I wept into my hands.

  “Tell her what?” Dina whispered as she rubbed my shoulder. Finally, she turned to the other girl, sitting on the couch. “Marci?”

  The zombie girl stood and grabbed the drugs off the table. “Tell her what?” Dina whispered.

  “I’m here,” I managed to say to the short-haired girl.

  Dina nodded and smiled at me. Then she gently took my hand and pressed it into the other girl’s pale hand. And Marci led me away.

  The New Frontier

  I’M ON MY WAY to Vegas with my friend Bobby Rausch to rescue his stepsister from a life of prostitution.

  It’s August 2003: two weeks since I found out I failed the bar exam, six months since I got divorced, a year since I caught my wife with another man, eighteen months since she caught me cheating.

  I’m on quite a streak.

  Bobby’s active duty in the air force, stationed at Fairchild; he gets us a lift on a transport out of Spokane. They strap us into jump seats in this flying boxcar and the thing lurches and rumbles and finally leaves the earth, Bobby giving a thumbs-up. I yell over the rumble of the plane, Are you scared?

  In three weeks Bobby leaves for Iraq.

  Scared? He flips up his sunglasses and grins at me. Bobby and I played football together at Mead High School, where we had one of those classic little-guy, big-guy friendships. But we hadn’t seen each other in years when I bumped into him at a bar in Spokane. Bobby teaches at the air force survival school. It’s the same thing he’ll do in Iraq: teach airmen how to live on lice and tree bark, how to withstand torture if they’re captured.

  You know the only thing that scares me? Bobby says. Going my whole life without getting the chance to prove myself.

  This is not the answer I would give.

  Two hours after we take off, our plane crests the pocked red and tan bluffs and we bank hard over a baked floodplain, the desert blooming with shrimp-curled cul-de-sacs, a sprawl of earth-tone houses with swimming pools, and beyond, the glittering lights of Vegas.

  That’s when I throw up.

  BOBBY’S PLAN in Vegas is to stay one step ahead of the wrecking ball—Sahara, Imperial Palace, New Frontier—Goin’ old strip, Bobby Rausch calls it. It’s also incredibly cheap, staying in hotels that are slated for demolition.

  Bobby wanted me to come to Vegas because he thought he might need a lawyer. I keep telling him that I haven’t actually passed the bar. Oh if I know my old buddy Nick, Bobby says, he ain’t gonna let that stop him from bein’ a lawyer.

  Actually, I say, failing the bar is precisely what stops you from being a lawyer.

  Well you can still give legal advice, right? he asks. ’Cause I might need some. Then he adds, apropos of nothing, Per se.

  What kind of legal advice? I ask. Per se.

  Well, like whether or not I can kill this shithead who turned my sister into a whore.

  I think about it for a minute. Then I tell Bobby my advice is to not kill the shithead who turned his stepsister into a whore.

  See, he says.

  ON THE STRIP, Rausch takes huge strides. I have to throw in a skip now and then just to keep up. At each hotel, he asks for the active-military discount. At each hotel, I lean over his shoulder and add: Two double beds, please.

  Bobby’s dream was to stay at the Sands and the Dunes, but those hotels have been torn down already, replaced by themed mega-resorts: Paris and the Venetian. So we stay at whatever old strip hotels haven’t been blown up, like the New Frontier, which—according to the brochure—opened as a roadhouse in ’42, reopened as the cowboy-themed Last Frontier in ’55, became the space-themed New Frontier after Kennedy’s 1960 convention speech (We stand at the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of unfulfilled hopes and dreams), hosted Elvis’s first Vegas performance in ’69, and went back to being a cowboy place in the ’70s.

  Today, the New Frontier is a paint-chipped, dirty old shell of a building that takes up an entire block. Its eighty-foot sign advertises BIKINI BULL RIDING, $8.75 STEAK AND SHRIMP, and MUD WRESTLING along with COLD BEER AND DIRTY GIRLS. The hotel is scheduled to be demolished in a few months but the guests at the New Frontier don’t look like they’ll make it that long. Everywhere there are canes and walkers, oxygen machines and motorized wheelchairs. Even the healthy people move in clouds of cigarette smoke, women straining polyester, men in raggedy cutoffs slathering mayonnaise on foot-long hot dogs. It’s as if the hotel were hosting a conference on adult onset diabetes.

  Bobby goes to the room to shower, and I kill some time at a blackjack table. I sit between a man with one arm and a woman hooked to an oxygen machine. I look around to make sure we haven’t checked into a VA hospital by mistake. Still, I win my first five hands, including two blackjacks. Then, on the sixth hand, I get a seventeen with the dealer showing a king. I hit, pull a four, and get twenty-one.

  Wow, somebody’s hot, says the woman next to me. Then she takes a hit from her oxygen machine.

  THIS WHOLE TIME, I’m thinking, I really should tell Bobby why I decided to come on this trip.

  EVERY NIGHT in Vegas, thousands of Mexican and Honduran immigrants stand along the street, handing out little playing cards with pictures of naked women on them. They snap the cards to get your attention. If you take a card and call the phone number on it, a stripper comes direct to your hotel room. Or a van picks you up and takes you to a brothel in the desert. Alongside the sexy women the cards feature some of the worst ad copy you’ve
ever seen: Nothing BUTT the best for you and Why not CUM see me tonight—

  It’s hard for me to imagine a human being stupid enough to need those nasty puns capitalized, but I suppose they’re out there.

  These snapper cards are the reason Bobby and I have come. Six weeks ago, one of Rausch’s fellow air force instructors returned from Vegas with a handful of these cards; on one of them was a photo of Bobby’s stepsister, Lisa. Bobby called the number on the card, but that particular company was out of business.

  I was dubious that it was Lisa until I saw the photo. It’s her all right. In the picture, she wears a white thong and is bending forward, bare-chested, little stars covering her nipples. Her card reads: Want me in your room in 30 minutes? Like a pizza. You could just see, on her hip, a little Panther tattoo. Our high school mascot. I remember when she got that tattoo. Rausch and I were seniors; she was a sophomore. Rausch punched his locker when he heard about it. Then he punched the poor kid who’d seen her hip tattoo.

  Rausch’s dad divorced Lisa’s mom a year after that, but Bobby continued to call Lisa his sister. He’d heard that she moved to Las Vegas and that she was dating a porno photographer. She told her family she was in real estate.

  There has been a downturn in housing prices, I offer helpfully.

  I FIRST met Lisa when I was a junior in high school and she was a freshman. I’d gone to Bobby’s house to see if he wanted to hang out. The Rausches were a big blended family, one kid on each side when the parents got married, and two babies between them. That day Lisa was in a lawn chair on the porch, wearing the tiniest pair of shorts, reading a magazine, and flipping a sandal up and down with her toe. I sure like your Camaro, Nick, she called down from the porch.

  I told her it was a Cavalier.

  Really? She smiled. Why so cavalier, Nick?

  I could not think of a thing to say. So often around Lisa I couldn’t think of a thing to say.