Strange Flesh

by Michael Olson

  “She used Billy’s own puppet-master techniques against him.”

  Mercer says nothing, but her eyes twinkle with satisfaction that I’m finally getting it.

  “And yet she seemed so hurt by everything that happened. After her brother broke into her apartment, she cried . . .”

  I think back to that night. Billy knew Blythe was attending that Women in Media panel. Remarkably unlucky that a freak carbon monoxide leak sent her back to the apartment to surprise him. She winds up bleeding in her twin’s arms.

  Was that the incident that finally did it for Blake? Or was it her sobbing as Billy sold his stock and then asking him, “Is it never going to stop?”

  For a woman who supposedly wanted peace between her brothers, she shed quite a few tears in front of Blake. Tears she must have known would inflame his hatred for Billy.

  Mercer says softly, “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”

  So Blythe wasn’t lamenting, she was recruiting. And she found eager volunteers in Blake and Mondano. Then I get stuck again. How did they ever locate Billy? They’d shown no ability in that regard before, and suddenly he winds up dead before I get to his apartment?

  Maybe “old John” already knew where he was. That day when he showed up at Amazone after ignoring my calls for over an hour, he told me he was “far afield” protecting Blythe. But I’ll bet she adheres to the “good offense” school of security. Let’s say she ordered McClaren and his surveillance teams to monitor what Blake and Mondano were going to do at the Cloisters from a safe distance. They see me release Billy, and so McClaren sends a detachment to follow him. Later that day, he “discovers” Billy’s whereabouts and passes that information along to her brother. Blake in turn passes it to Mondano’s people, who then pass a lethal jolt of current through Billy’s brain.

  If all this is true, it’s a hand well played. Using Mondano, McClaren, and me as the fuel, the brothers incinerate themselves in their feud, leaving Blythe to cool their ashes with her tears.

  Weeping, but standing alone on the field.

  I say, “Okay, Billy I get. But Blake wound up dead too. Was that just luck?”

  “Well, you pulled the trigger. What did it feel like to you?”

  I light a cigarette, still thinking. Mercer surprises me by reaching for one as well.

  Standing there, facing off amidst all the blood, I remember both of us being dumbfounded that things had gone so haywire.

  Mercer continues. “I think we taught you well enough to appreciate that one can never plan everything to the last detail. Chaos will reign. But that doesn’t mean you can’t devise scenarios that tilt the odds to your advantage. That put others in impossible situations.”

  So if Blythe was an even better puppet master than Billy, might she also be a better social engineer than I am?

  After that initial meeting, I’d asked myself, “Why me?” The answer: Blythe knew I’d be especially easy to beguile into serving her aims. Thinking back through the past weeks, I see how she used each of our encounters to deploy a specific technique we Soshes use to worm our way into the good graces of our victims. Establishing trust.

  At our Harvard Club chat she delivered the classic appeal for help, while providing privileged information about her brother Blake. She then offered me special assistance with her father’s records, at which point she also directly contradicted a few of Blake’s lies and evasions. She said he was “slow to trust.” The message I took to heart: “You should not trust him. Trust me.”

  “We both trusted Blythe, but not each other,” I say.

  “And why didn’t he trust you, his faithful janissary?”

  “I met with the iTeam instead of going to him after finding Billy’s place.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I was scared. Seeing the body was upsetting, but I more or less knew that was in the works. I was scared for myself. The night he died, Billy warned me. He said, ‘He knows you know. Do you think he’s going to let you live?’”

  “He said that to you?”

  Wait . . . No, that’s not right. He didn’t say it. I read it.

  “We were chatting in NOD.” Which is odd, since he had used the voice system in our previous meeting. Also wrong was the undecorated blankness of the space. The still, zombie-like avatar, a stark contrast to Billy’s previous showy animations.

  “Dear boy, that could have been anyone.”

  Who was it then? One of Blythe’s people, maybe McClaren, trying to condition my interpretation of events and turn me against Blake.

  “But why?”

  “Look at what happened,” she says.

  I freak out and try to take off with Xan and Garriott. Blake and Mondano move to prevent that. Since they’ve just murdered Billy, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that violence could ensue. Blake might be implicated in a crime serious enough to neutralize him. Maybe Blythe had been preparing me for the time when she’d ask me to help her do just that.

  If true, then her plan worked better than she might have wished. Blake and I ended up pointing guns at each other. Had he been fed disinformation about me as well? Something that moved him to pull the trigger? Would I have gotten my shot off if I weren’t disposed to believe that he really meant me harm? Was it Blythe’s whisper in my brain that added just enough pressure on my index finger to see her brother dead?

  I’m amazed at how my new picture of Blythe’s actions so closely mirrors Billy’s game. They both seeded cancerous information about their family within distracting spectacles. In his case, Savant; in hers, this break-in at her apartment. He used an avatar to represent as his brother, while she impersonated him. He tried to deploy Gina’s video to antagonize the twins. She succeeded in using it against him. He taunted Blake with a fake electrocution; she made sure that image became a reality. Whatever moves Billy made, she played right back at him. Even the idea to distort the reflections on Gina’s pupils derived from Billy’s Getting Wet video.

  I look at Mercer. “So what do I do now?”

  “I would recommend a stiff drink to fortify yourself for the realization that the game is over. Please don’t indulge the self-important notion that it’s your responsibility to ensure ‘justice’ is served. Indeed, where is the crime here? Maybe something petty like bribing a police officer. Perhaps some flavor of conspiracy. But let’s be honest, these are things we do every day.”

  “There are five dead bodies here. Including both her brothers.”

  “But she didn’t fire a weapon. You were the one who did that. James, you must assure me you won’t do anything rash. I trust you can see that should you involve anyone else, they may have a less than sympathetic view of your participation in all this. Of course, you remember the cardinal rule of our business?”

  “Never make yourself a soft target.”

  “And don’t forget what you’ve learned about Blythe Randall thus far.”

  That she is a dangerous woman, to be fucked with at your peril.

  Mercer sees the acquiescence form in my eyes before I actually come to a decision. She stands and brushes a lock of hair off my forehead. “Do come see me when you’ve spent yourself on this new . . . enterprise of yours.”

  In parting, she plants an adder strike of a kiss on my cheek.

  The next day, an invitation arrives.

  Blythe is having cocktails at her apartment to celebrate her promotion to CEO of IMP. A little more than a year after her brother’s funeral. The minimum decent mourning period.

  Written on the embossed cardstock in red pen are the words:

  Perverse? Perhaps. But I suppose serving the Imp runs in my family. Anyway, I’ll bet nothing shocks you these days.

  —B

  81

  When I first saw her ridiculous ballroom, I thought it far too large to ever be filled. But tonight Blythe has made a fine effort to do so. The bulk of the crowd consists of executives from IMP with a contingent of up-and-coming actors from their studios to provide the requi
site astral element.

  I notice Blythe across the room immediately. She’s alight with plutocratic joy, laughing and gesturing broadly. Her beloved scarlet pearls gleam at her neck, and I can’t help thinking that the strand has grown a bit longer. I’m burning to speak with her, but the conversation will require privacy, so I scuttle out of her line of sight. Biding my time.

  Luckily I find a group of old friends from school huddled in a corner of her aircraft carrier of a balcony. I sequester myself among them, as I field questions probing how I’ve risen in the world enough to score this invite.

  I’m astounded at how the night melts away. My watch suddenly reads three thirty AM. When my opponent passes out, I emerge from the billiards room to see that the party has breathed its last gasp. I spare a glance into the ballroom as I pass by. The only signs of the earlier throng are several sticky puddles reflecting the light coming through the windows from a giant moon. Under that moon is a slender figure leaning, hands spread wide, against the balcony’s rail. Blythe.

  I can tell from her posture exactly where she is right now. Outside on a perfect night, after a rocking party, celebrating something special. I know the feeling: you want to be by yourself looking down at the sleeping world and take some time to simply rejoice. Though Blythe is the kind of person who’s probably already making new plans. And I’m afraid some of those plans include me.

  I’d agonized about coming tonight. Her sub-rosa investment in ArrowTech meant that I’d have to constantly watch her and worry about her latest agenda. That seemed untenable. So while I may not have the courage to go to the police, at least I want a divorce. The question was: how to serve the papers?

  That made me think of the last time I presented her with special papers. Back then my purpose was nearly the opposite, but reprising that motif felt like the right way to close the circle.

  I slip through the balcony doors and watch her for a moment. “Blythe . . . Are you starting to feel lonely at all?”

  She shuts her eyes and inhales deeply. Then she takes her purse from the balustrade and fishes inside it. I entertain the possibility that she’s thumbing a radio that will signal black helicopters to descend and whisk me away, but she merely extracts a pack of Nat Shermans. I light one for her, and she hands it to me. Then I light hers. She sends a long plume of smoke out over the city. I’m about to repeat myself when she looks at me and smiles slyly.

  “You ever think about tattoos? As a form of self-expression?”

  “I asked you a question.”

  She ignores it again. “We live in an inspiring age. Human freedom is erupting across the globe. And people embody this by doodling on their skin. Little pictures we use to define ourselves.”

  “And?”

  “So poor Billy and his unfortunate friends decorated their bodies with their obsessions. One of them even crafted her demise around her sacred symbol.”

  “Billy’s demise was ‘crafted’ that way too.”

  Blythe nods equably. “You’d seen Blake’s right wrist? The Suicide King? He got it shortly after our father passed away. It doesn’t take a genius to unravel its meaning. But most people didn’t know that he had one on the inside of his left wrist too. His watch band covered it. The Gemini glyph. That was for me, of course. Our birth sign is Aries.”

  She takes another long drag. “When people looked at us, that’s what came to mind: the Gemini. Two, that are in some unnatural way really one. Identical. Copies of each other. Obviously we’re fraternal. Male and female. Maybe an even stranger pair for that . . . Did you know that I have a tattoo as well?”

  I didn’t, though I have studied Blythe closely when permitted. I can definitively say she didn’t have one in college and doesn’t have one now anywhere that normally sees daylight. She pivots away from me on a heel, her backless dress framing a perfect expanse of white in the moonlight. Her hand brushes slowly down the smooth fabric to the juncture just north of decency. She pulls it down an exquisite inch to reveal two things.

  The first is that she has a small Taijitu, the Taoist yin and yang symbol, right over her L5 vertebra. The second: that she has disdained the comfort of even a G-string tonight.

  I find myself speechless. Blythe continues. “I know. A silly tramp stamp. How ridiculous, right? I often think of having it lasered away. But that little mark was very important to a confused college girl whose father had just died. And so I never get around to erasing it.”

  I clear my throat. “It’s, ah, fascinating, but—”

  She turns back to me, knowing her display had the desired effect. “So to me, Blake and I were more like the poles of a magnet. Bound together, irreducible, but at the same time opposite.”

  “Blythe, that’s a lovely metaphor, but you’re evading my question.”

  She holds up her hand, commanding patience. “I’m not. You want to know about my brothers’ sad end, and I’m telling you the way I see it.” She looks like she’s about to say something cutting to me, but then she purses her lips and peers back out across the park. “Take Billy. Do you know why he chose Sade for his absurd production?” She waits for a response, but I just stare back at her, wanting to see where this is going.

  She continues. “Sade was a philosopher of power and its dynamics.” Her lips draw a sip of scotch, and her other hand traces a sinuous pattern on the stone in front of her. “To Billy, power was something to be struggled against rather than channeled.”

  I picture him lying next to his mother, her back a bleeding mess. “I wonder where he got that idea?”

  “He was always that way. Unlike Billy, I see Sade as a novelty act. On the subject of power, I prefer Maxwell. His laws of electromagnetism. My little brother lived his life moving through his twin siblings’ magnetic field. But he had this quality of resistance. If you remember your physics, what happens then?”

  “Power is converted to heat.”

  “And what does heat do?”

  “It dissipates.”

  Blythe nods sadly. “Sometimes, yes. But it can also burn. If the surge is too great, the resistor is destroyed.”

  “So it was all inevitable. Like clockwork.”

  “The laws of nature are immutable. Woe unto him that sets himself against them.”

  “And Blake?”

  “Blake died from simple ballistics. Surely I don’t have to explain that to you.”

  “He got what was . . . coming to him?”

  Blythe shrugs. “I wasn’t the one who dreamed of committing my younger brother in a jurisdiction where they still practice electroshock treatment. Remarkable how Billy’s demise so closely fulfilled that fantasy. Just far more efficiently. And you certainly don’t think such a vulgar display was my idea?”

  “Blythe, I can’t be in business with someone who has such fine aesthetic sensibilities.”

  She playfully feigns offense. “You want to abandon me? After all I’ve done for you?”

  “I’m more worried about what you’ll do to me. So here, I have something for you. A parting gift.” I extract from my coat pocket a new bouquet of origami roses. But these I made with images rather than verse.

  She seems charmed, but her eyes narrow as she unravels the first one.

  A still I isolated from Billy’s trove of necrotic family videos. The nasty conclusion of the force-feeding episode.

  Continuing the theme, the next flower contains one of freelance photo-pharmacist Pete Novak’s least-flattering shots of Blythe in distress.

  Her fingers tear violently at the next one: a full nude she let me take of her in perhaps our most tender moment. That’s when she really absorbs the pictures’ message:

  You can’t trust me. I will hurt you.

  But the next one puzzles her. A crime scene photo of Billy’s disfigured corpse. An inset zooms in on an exposed fingerprint on the batteries’ throw switch. Blythe raises an eyebrow at me.

  “Amazing the police didn’t run down an unidentified print at the crime scene. I guess someone else must have b
een there when he died . . . Can you account for your whereabouts?”

  “Tampering with a closed case file? A rather fanciful use of your talents, James.”

  “Consider it a tribute. Using a technique I learned from you. You think it’s fanciful because you weren’t actually there. You didn’t do anything, so you couldn’t have left fingerprints, right? But you did play a role, and you did leave fingerprints.”

  I whip open the last flower for her. This one is not an image, but rather a transcript of my final NOD chat with Billy’s avatar. The words are annotated with interstitial numbers denoting detailed timing metrics on each character as it was typed. Together, those measurements, called “keystroke dynamics,” can be processed for any given person into a behavioral biometric signature. When I worked for Ravelin during college, they made telecommuting employees use an app that periodically verified your identity this way, and it had recorded Blythe’s profile when she sent an email from my laptop. On matching her keyboard signature to Billy’s av, at first I couldn’t believe she’d risk hijacking it herself. But then Blythe probably didn’t even trust McClaren with her most delicate business. Having known Billy from birth, she’d have been the best choice to channel him.

  “That’s clearly you, Blythe. Your w’s and s’s are real slow.” I wiggle my left ring finger at her to contrast it with the crooked immobility of hers.

  “Hardly proof of anything.”

  “No, just evidence. You think anyone might find it interesting that you were impersonating Billy online just after his death, but before you could have known about it?”

  She doesn’t make a sound, but her chest rises with a deep breath. She’s mastering herself, suppressing rage. She couldn’t even abide sharing power with her twin. Now my standing here with this scintilla of leverage must drive her insane. And beyond that, I suppose it will torture her that I found a crack in her masterwork. One that perhaps exposes a structural weakness and portends more cracks to come.