White Wolf waves you over to an empty booth. A Coors Light waits for you. You slide into the booth and wrap a hand around the cool damp skin of the bottle, pleasantly surprised.
“A lucky guess, did I get it right?”
You nod and take a sip. That first sip is always magic. Like how you imagine Golden, Colorado must feel like on a winter morning.
“So,” White Wolf says, “tell me about yourself.”
You look around the bar for familiar faces. Are you really going to do this? Tell a Tourist about your life? Your real life? A little voice in your head whispers that maybe this isn’t so smart. Boss could find out and get mad. DarAnne could make fun of you. Besides, White Wolf will want a cool story, something real authentic, and all you have is an aging three-bedroom ranch and a student loan.
But he’s looking at you, friendly interest, and nobody looks at you like that much anymore, not even Theresa. So you talk.
Not everything.
But some. Enough.
Enough that when the bartender calls last call you realize you’ve been talking for two hours.
When you stand up to go, White Wolf stands up, too. You shake hands, Indian-style, which makes you smile. You didn’t expect it, but you’ve got a good, good feeling.
“So, same time tomorrow?” White Wolf asks.
You’re tempted, but, “No, Theresa will kill me if I stay out this late two nights in a row.” And then, “But how about Friday?”
“Friday it is.” White Wolf touches your shoulder. “See you then, Jesse.”
You feel a warm flutter of anticipation for Friday. “See you.”
◉ ◉ ◉
Friday you are there by 11:05 p.m. White Wolf laughs when he sees your face, and you grin back, only a little embarrassed. This time you pay for the drinks, and the two of you pick up right where you left off. It’s so easy. White Wolf never seems to tire of your stories and it’s been so long since you had a new friend to tell them to, that you can’t seem to quit. It turns out White Wolf loves Kevin Costner, too, and you take turns quoting lines at each other until White Wolf stumps you with a Wind in His Hair quote.
“Are you sure that’s in the movie?”
“It’s Lakota!”
You won’t admit it, but you’re impressed with how good White Wolf’s Lakota sounds.
White Wolf smiles. “Looks like I know something you don’t.”
You wave it away good-naturedly, but vow to watch the movie again.
Time flies and once again, after last call, you both stand outside under the Big Chief. You happily agree to meet again next Tuesday. And the following Friday. Until it becomes your new routine.
The month passes quickly. The next month, too.
“You seem too happy,” Theresa says one night, sounding suspicious.
You grin and wrap your arms around your wife, pulling her close until her rose-scented shampoo fills your nose. “Just made a friend, is all. A guy from work.” You decide to keep it vague. Hanging with White Wolf, who you’ve long stopped thinking of as just a Tourist, would be hard to explain.
“You’re not stepping out on me, Jesse Turnblatt? Because I will—”
You cut her off with a kiss. “Are you jealous?”
“Should I be?”
“Never.”
She sniffs, but lets you kiss her again, her soft body tight against yours.
“I love you,” you murmur as your hands dip under her shirt.
“You better.”
◉ ◉ ◉
Tuesday morning and you can’t breathe. Your nose is a deluge of snot and your joints ache. Theresa calls in sick for you and bundles you in bed with a bowl of stew. You’re supposed to meet White Wolf for your usual drink, but you’re much too sick. You consider sending Theresa with a note, but decided against it. It’s only one night. White Wolf will understand.
But by Friday the coughing has become a deep rough bellow that shakes your whole chest. When Theresa calls in sick for you again, you make sure your cough is loud enough for Boss to hear it. Pray he doesn’t dock you for the days you’re missing. But what you’re most worried about is standing up White Wolf again.
“Do you think you could go for me?” you ask Theresa.
“What, down to the bar? I don’t drink.”
“I’m not asking you to drink. Just to meet him, let him know I’m sick. He’s probably thinking I forgot about him.”
“Can’t you call him?”
“I don’t have his number.”
“Fine, then. What’s his name?”
You hesitate. Realize you don’t know. The only name you know is the one you gave him. “White Wolf.”
“Okay, then. Get some rest.”
Theresa doesn’t get back until almost 1 a.m. “Where were you?” you ask, alarmed. Is that a rosy flush in her cheeks, the scent of Cherry Coke on her breath?
“At the bar like you asked me to.”
“What took so long?”
She huffs. “Did you want me to go or not?”
“Yes, but . . . well, did you see him?”
She nods, smiles a little smile that you’ve never seen on her before.
“What is it?” Something inside you shrinks.
“A nice man. Real nice. You didn’t tell me he was Cherokee.”
◉ ◉ ◉
By Monday you’re able to drag yourself back to work. There’s a note taped to your locker to go see Boss. You find him in his office, looking through the reports that he sends to Management every week.
“I hired a new guy.”
You swallow the excuses you’ve prepared to explain how sick you were, your promises to get your numbers up. They become a hard ball in your throat.
“Sorry, Jesse.” Boss actually does look a little sorry. “This guy is good, a real rez guy. Last name’s ‘Wolf’. I mean, shit, you can’t get more Indian than that. The Tourists are going to eat it up.”
“The Tourists love me, too.” You sound whiny, but you can’t help it. There’s a sinking feeling in your gut that tells you this is bad, bad, bad.
“You’re good, Jesse. But nobody knows anything about Pueblo Indians, so all you’ve got is that TV shit. This guy, he’s . . .” Boss snaps his fingers, trying to conjure the word.
“Authentic?” A whisper.
Boss points his finger like a gun. “Bingo. Look, if another pod opens up, I’ll call you.”
“You gave him my pod?”
Boss’s head snaps up, wary. You must have yelled that. He reaches over to tap a button on his phone and call security.
“Wait!” you protest.
But the men in uniforms are already there to escort you out.
◉ ◉ ◉
You can’t go home to Teresa. You just can’t. So you head to the Hey U.S.A. It’s a different crowd than you’re used to. An afternoon crowd. Heavy boozers and people without jobs. You laugh because you fit right in.
The guys next to you are doing shots. Tiny glasses of rheumy dark liquor lined up in a row. You haven’t done shots since college but when one of the men offers you one, you take it. Choke on the cheap whiskey that burns down your throat. Two more and the edges of your panic start to blur soft and tolerable. You can’t remember what time it is when you get up to leave, but the Big Chief is bright in the night sky.
You stumble through the door and run smack into DarAnne. She growls at you, and you try to stutter out an apology but a heavy hand comes down on your shoulder before you get the words out.
“This asshole bothering you?”
You recognize that voice. “White Wolf?” It’s him. But he looks different to you. Something you can’t quite place. Maybe it’s the ribbon shirt he’s wearing, or the bone choker around his neck. Is his skin a little tanner than it was last week?
“Do you k
now this guy?” DarAnne asks, and you think she’s talking to you, but her head is turned towards White Wolf.
“Never seen him,” White Wolf says as he stares you down, and under that confident glare you almost believe him. Almost forget that you’ve told this man things about you even Theresa doesn’t know.
“It’s me,” you protest, but your voice comes out in a whiskey-slurred squeak that doesn’t even sound like you.
“Fucking glonnies,” DarAnne mutters as she pushes past you. “Always making a scene.”
“I think you better go, buddy,” White Wolf says. Not unkindly, if you were in fact strangers, if you weren’t actually buddies. But you are, and you clutch at his shirtsleeve, shouting something about friendship and Theresa and then the world melts into a blur until you feel the hard slap of concrete against your shoulder and the taste of blood on your lip where you bit it and a solid kick to your gut until the whiskey comes up the way it went down and then the Big Chief is blinking at you, How, How, How, until the darkness comes to claim you and the lights all flicker out.
◉ ◉ ◉
You wake up in the gutter. The fucking gutter. With your head aching and your mouth as dry and rotted as month-old roadkill. The sun is up, Arizona fire beating across your skin. Your clothes are filthy and your shoes are missing and there’s a smear of blood down your chin and drying flakes in the creases of your neck. Your hands are chapped raw. And you can’t remember why.
But then you do.
And the humiliation sits heavy on your bruised up shoulder, a dark shame that defies the desert sun. Your job. DarAnne ignoring you like that. White Wolf kicking your ass. And you out all night, drunk in a downtown gutter. It all feels like a terrible dream, like the worst kind. The ones you can’t wake up from because it’s real life.
Your car isn’t where you left it, likely towed with the street sweepers, so you trudge your way home on sock feet. Three miles on asphalt streets until you see your highly-mortgaged three-bedroom ranch. And for once the place looks beautiful, like the day you bought it. Tears gather in your eyes as you push open the door.
“Theresa,” you call. She’s going to be pissed, and you’re going to have to talk fast, explain the whole drinking thing (it was one time!) and getting fired (I’ll find a new job, I promise), but right now all you want is to wrap her in your arms and let her rose-scent fill your nose like good medicine.
“Theresa,” you call again, as you limp through the living room. Veer off to look in the bedroom, check behind the closed bathroom door. But what you see in the bathroom makes you pause. Things are missing. Her toothbrush, the pack of birth control, contact lens solution.
“Theresa!?” and this time you are close to panic as you hobble down the hall to the kitchen.
The smell hits you first. The scent of fresh coffee, bright and familiar.
When you see the person sitting calmly at the kitchen table, their back to you, you relax. But that’s not Theresa.
He turns slightly, enough so you can catch his profile, and says, “Come on in, Jesse.”
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
White Wolf winces, as if your words hurt him. “You better have a seat.”
“What did you do to my wife?!”
“I didn’t do anything to your wife.” He picks up a small folded piece of paper, holds it out. You snatch it from his fingers and move so you can see his face. The note in your hand feels like wildfire, something with the potential to sear you to the bone. You want to rip it wide open, you want to flee before its revelations scar you. You ache to read it now, now, but you won’t give him the satisfaction of your desperation.
“So now you remember me,” you huff.
“I apologize for that. But you were making a scene and I couldn’t have you upsetting DarAnne.”
You want to ask how he knows DarAnne, how he was there with her in the first place. But you already know. Boss said the new guy’s name was Wolf.
“You’re a real son of a bitch, you know that?”
White Wolf looks away from you, that same pained look on his face. Like you’re embarrassing yourself again. “Why don’t you help yourself to some coffee,” he says, gesturing to the coffee pot. Your coffee pot.
“I don’t need your permission to get coffee in my own house,” you shout.
“Okay,” he says, leaning back. You can’t help but notice how handsome he looks, his dark hair a little longer, the choker on his neck setting off the arch of his high cheekbones.
You take your time getting coffee – sugar, creamer which you would never usually take –before you drop into the seat across from him. Only then do you open the note, hands trembling, dread twisting hard in your gut.
“She’s gone to her mother’s,” White Wolf explains as you read the same words on the page. “For her own safety. She wants you out by the time she gets back.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Only the truth. That you got yourself fired, that you were on a bender, drunk in some alleyway downtown like a bad stereotype.” He leans in. “You’ve been gone for two days.”
You blink. It’s true, but it’s not true, too.
“Theresa wouldn’t . . .” But she would, wouldn’t she? She’d said it a million times, given you a million chances.
“She needs a real man, Jesse. Someone who can take care of her.”
“And that’s you?” You muster all the scorn you can when you say that, but it comes out more a question than a judgment. You remember how you gave him the benefit of the doubt on that whole Cherokee thing, how you thought “pretendian” was cruel.
He clears his throat. Stands.
“It’s time for you to go,” he says. “I promised Theresa you’d be gone, and I’ve got to get to work soon.” Something about him seems to expand, to take up the space you once occupied. Until you feel small, superfluous.
“Did you ever think,” he says, his voice thoughtful, his head tilted to study you like a strange foreign body, “that maybe this is my experience, and you’re the tourist here?”
“This is my house,” you protest, but you’re not sure you believe it now. Your head hurts. The coffee in your hand is already cold. How long have you been sitting here? Your thoughts blur to histories, your words become nothing more than forgotten facts and half-truths. Your heart, a dusty repository for lost loves and desires, never realized.
“Not anymore,” he says.
Nausea rolls over you. That same stretching sensation you get when you Relocate out of an Experience.
Whiplash, and then . . .
You let go.
END
A Series of Steaks
Vina Jie-Min Prasad
All known forgeries are tales of failure. The people who get into the newsfeeds for their brilliant attempts to cheat the system with their fraudulent Renaissance masterpieces or their stacks of fake cheques, well, they might be successful artists, but they certainly haven’t been successful at forgery.
The best forgeries are the ones that disappear from notice—a second-rate still-life mouldering away in gallery storage, a battered old 50-yuan note at the bottom of a cashier drawer—or even a printed strip of Matsusaka beef, sliding between someone’s parted lips.
◉ ◉ ◉
Forging beef is similar to printmaking—every step of the process has to be done with the final print in mind. A red that’s too dark looks putrid, a white that’s too pure looks artificial. All beef is supposed to come from a cow, so stipple the red with dots, flecks, lines of white to fake variance in muscle fibre regions. Cows are similar, but cows aren’t uniform—use fractals to randomise marbling after defining the basic look. Cut the sheets of beef manually to get an authentic ragged edge, don’t get lazy and depend on the bioprinter for that.
Days of research and calibration and cursing the printer will all vanish
into someone’s gullet in seconds, if the job’s done right.
Helena Li Yuanhui of Splendid Beef Enterprises is an expert in doing the job right.
The trick is not to get too ambitious. Most forgers are caught out by the smallest errors—a tiny amount of period-inaccurate pigment, a crack in the oil paint that looks too artificial, or a misplaced watermark on a passport. Printing something large increases the chances of a fatal misstep. Stick with small-scale jobs, stick with a small group of regular clients, and in time, Splendid Beef Enterprises will turn enough of a profit for Helena to get a real name change, leave Nanjing, and forget this whole sorry venture ever happened.
As Helena’s loading the beef into refrigerated boxes for drone delivery, a notification pops up on her iKontakt frames. Helena sighs, turns the volume on her earpiece down, and takes the call.
“Hi, Mr Chan, could you switch to a secure line? You just need to tap the button with a lock icon, it’s very easy.”
“Nonsense!” Mr Chan booms. “If the government were going to catch us they’d have done so by now! Anyway, I just called to tell you how pleased I am with the latest batch. Such a shame, though, all that talent and your work just gets gobbled up in seconds—tell you what, girl, for the next beef special, how about I tell everyone that the beef came from one of those fancy vertical farms? I’m sure they’d have nice things to say then!”
“Please don’t,” Helena says, careful not to let her Cantonese accent slip through. It tends to show after long periods without any human interaction, which is an apt summary of the past few months. “It’s best if no one pays attention to it.”
“You know, Helena, you do good work, but I’m very concerned about your self-esteem, I know if I printed something like that I’d want everyone to appreciate it! Let me tell you about this article my daughter sent me, you know research says that people without friends are prone to . . .” Mr Chan rambles on as Helena sticks the labels on the boxes—Grilliam Shakespeare, Gyuuzen Sukiyaki, Fatty Chan’s Restaurant—and thankfully hangs up before Helena sinks into further depression. She takes her iKontakt off before heading to the drone delivery office, giving herself some time to recover from Mr Chan’s relentless cheerfulness.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2019 Page 3
