NK3

by Michael Tolkin

  “Such as?”

  “Another Burn and not enough time to prepare for such problems as arrive with the frightened Drifters.”

  Redwings returned to Los Angeles, a happy man, an always happy man, grateful to the Founders for their gifts and for their wisdom as taught by June Moulton. “You’re here!” That’s what June said was their great lesson. Yes, and every morning he woke up, his first thought was: “I’m here.”

  Hopper

  Hopper stayed with the plan impressed on him by the Teacher and rode on the freeway but only after the sun went down. On the mostly flat road, with his light carbon fiber frame, he made fifty miles the first night and stopped in Pomona for the day. The Teacher told him he would find food in the box stores and warehouses with the green triangles painted on the walls. The doors would be locked and sealed but there would usually be a way in through the roof. He found a Mexican supermarket with the green triangle, but when he broke in through the roof, he couldn’t find anything to eat except for a few boxes of taco shells.

  Erin, Chisel Girl, ElderGoth,

  Chief, Sinatra

  With the death of the pilot, ElderGoth was sure that someone on the Verification Committee had sent word to LAX. She asked everyone if they had betrayed the First Wave and everyone answered that they hadn’t. So that was that, a good question, no useful answers. She stayed close to Erin.

  “How’s the day going?”

  “I’ve had nothing but Shamblers. Jobe and Helary both scored Oscars before lunch and they’re done.” Oscars is what they called anyone who had worked in the movie business. Jobe verified a film editor; Helary verified a writer. Film editors were valuable because they’d been trained for the minute examination of things. The rule about writers was not to tell them they were verified, and just ship them downtown and let them continue to drift.

  “I don’t think there’s anybody left to verify,” said Erin, only because she was having such a boring, boring day. “We’ve basically got everyone with skills that are needed except for another pilot and did you hear about the doctor? I feel bad for him. Maybe he drowned?”

  It was the end of the day and about time to go when Pickle arrived with the Drifter couple and Chisel Girl. The intake papers said that a bloody weapon had been taken from the woman, which made her sound just interesting enough that Erin claimed her, although later Erin said the vibration of her real identity was clear just from the intake papers. Erin also later said that what gave her the feeling that history was being made wasn’t the woman’s face but a feeling of familiarity in the woman’s posture. Drifters weren’t angry or depressed; they were dull. This woman stepped through the door with an assumption of deserved attention, with an expectation for something that wasn’t there, but it was something she wanted, something that had once been hers, something she missed.

  She looked to be in her early thirties, but everyone who drifts looks older than they really are. She wore a hooded gray sweatshirt zipped to the neck.

  Erin introduced herself. “I’m Erin. Do you know your name?”

  “I don’t know anyone long enough to get to the name part.”

  Erin took the woman’s picture, from the front and from both sides, and sent them into the computer.

  “You were found close to the city. Where have you been for the last four years?”

  “What’s a year?”

  “Do you know where you are?” Erin asked.

  “They said this is the city.”

  “Do you know the name of the city?”

  “I forget.”

  “Where were you yesterday?”

  “I forget.”

  The hint of a secret brought Erin’s attention to something in Chisel Girl’s responses that might sound to others like nothing more than proof of Drifter mindlessness. But to Erin it sounded like defiance. If she was defiant, she wasn’t a regular Drifter. If she were pretending to be one, then Erin would probe until she broke her down.

  “What’s your first memory?”

  “Lights. People screaming.”

  “Why are they mad at you?”

  “I didn’t say they were mad at me. I said they were screaming, but they were also smiling.”

  “Do you remember when you were a little girl?”

  “I forget.”

  Chisel Girl lowered the zipper of her sweatshirt to let in air and Erin saw the top of an ornate tattoo.

  “Could you do me a favor and take off your shirt?”

  Modesty died with memory. The woman unzipped the sweatshirt. She wore nothing underneath, and at the first sight of the tattoo—a jeweled Russian Orthodox cross from her neck to her stomach, with gold trefoils around her nipples—Erin knew that if the woman had a tattoo on her back, and that tattoo was a portrait of Chisel Girl herself rising naked out of an eggshell beside a fire-breathing dragon standing on the bloody corpse of a vanquished Saint George, then the only proof necessary for verification of this woman would be the signature of the tattoo artist at the base of her spine.

  “Stand up and turn around.”

  The woman stood up, dropped the sweatshirt, and showed her back to Erin. There it was, in Russian letters. Erin could now make sense of her suspicions about this woman. For the first time since the world changed, Erin thought the world had been restored. She checked the computer to see if the woman’s face matched the database. No. But she didn’t care. She told the woman not to move and ran to ElderGoth. “ElderGoth, I have to show you something. Right now.”

  ElderGoth, always steady, saw the woman with her top off.

  “Why is she naked?”

  Erin said, “Just look. You have to see this.”

  “It’s against rules to leave a Drifter alone during verification.”

  “This is no ordinary Drifter. You’ve been in my room at home. You’ve seen the poster on the wall. Well, here she is. Shannon Squier.”

  “Who?”

  “The singer.”

  “I still don’t know her.”

  “I do.”

  “Did she verify?”

  “No. She doesn’t have to. I can verify. Redwings can verify. He has a tattoo from the same tattoo artist.”

  Erin’s bedroom remained as it had been when she returned from the treatment at UCLA, and the centerpiece of one wall was the poster of a woman with silver hair, purple glitter streaks around her eyes (the same purple Erin chose for her own wild hair), upper lip painted black, lower lip blood red. The woman’s parents were Russian and at the time the picture was taken she had the most famously wide Slavic eyes in the world. Erin knew the face on the wall better than she knew her own, since she had forgotten the first fifteen years of her life and with that disappearance went all the time she’d spent looking at herself in the mirror. It was a peculiarity of the rehabilitation: like most people in the Fence, Erin could never get used to the face that was forever jumping out of stray reflections. June Moulton declared this the “stranger effect” and for some people it was the hardest symptom of the plague.

  ElderGoth walked around the woman a few times.

  “The back,” said Erin. “Look at her back.”

  “That’s the tattoo from the billboards and the posters.”

  ElderGoth touched it and Chisel Girl turned around and punched ElderGoth in the face, knocking her down. The Security reps came over and grabbed Chisel Girl’s arms while Erin cried for them to let her go.

  “This is Shannon Squier. You don’t treat her this way. She’s the best person in the world and I found her.”

  ElderGoth asked, “How do you know she’s really Shannon Squier?”

  “The signature,” said Erin. “You’ve seen copies of this tattoo on people’s backs, never as good, and they never have the Smersh signature.”

  The sixth album of the most famous singer in the world had been released the week before the first c
ase of the disease in America, and the advertising campaign had covered billboards and buses with a photograph of that tattoo. Shreds of the billboard were everywhere. Memories of the singer as a personality had disappeared, but the tattoo itself, and her music, rediscovered, not remembered, had become for the tribe that lived inside the Fence the anthem of and a requiem for the lost world. Some say that The Woman, on one foot, dancing to unheard music, was really meant to be Shannon. Other Drifters had walked in with versions of that tattoo: there were verified women and even some men with versions of that tattoo, but it wasn’t the egg, the dragon, or the dead saint that gave immediate verification to this sunburned, scarred, and emaciated Drifter, naked without shame. No, it was the large block of Cyrillic letters across the base of her spine: CMEPIII. Erin knew from the singer’s authorized autobiography on her bookshelf, along with the unauthorized biography, that the word was pronounced Smersh, the acronym for the Russian words Shmert Spionam, or Death to Spies, which was the name of a spy network in the James Bond novels. СМЕРШ was also the name of the Moscow tattoo artist who had done the work and any ink genius with the talent to do work this fine would never copy Smersh’s signature. This was the original. Shannon Squier was alive and Erin had found her.

  Chisel Girl said, “What’s my name?”

  “Your name is Shannon Squier. You’re Shannon Squier and everyone loves you.” Erin started to cry, first from a gratitude she’d never known, not since waking from rehab, and then from something new. For the first time in four years she could feel with certainty that a world was gone and, with it, people she had loved. She saw, just for a second—less than a second—that the great Fence that circled her world had the shape of the great fence that circled what used to be called her soul and that outside that North Korean fence, it was all a Burn Zone. Recoiling from the shadows of depthless melancholy, Erin wanted Shannon to be her best friend, her best sex-game partner, her best everything.

  “Whatever you want, from now on, whatever you want, you’re going to have.”

  “I’m thirsty. I want water.”

  ElderGoth said, “I’ll get it.”

  Erin said, “Shannon, you can put your shirt on.”

  Chief, Pippi Longstocking

  Chief was on the phone and Pippi heard him say, “Who is Shannon Squier?” There was an explanation. “A singer? How would I remember that? If she’s not verified, we can’t take her, Erin. That’s rule one.” More talk from Erin. Then: “The same signature. If she’s not in the computer . . .” Finally: “No, you’ve never asked me for a favor like this. And yes, I care about you but you can’t bring her in without my permission. I’ll come down.”

  He ended the call and told Pippi he might be back with someone special.

  “Did I sound excited?”

  “You sounded suspicious.”

  “Good.”

  “Are you excited?”

  “The Woman told me someone was coming.”

  “And that’s enough to verify . . . Who?”

  “Someone named Shannon Squier.”

  “She’s a little more than ‘someone.’ Erin has Shannon Squier pictures in her bedroom. And there are billboards with her name on them.”

  “Of course,” said Chief.

  “You haven’t noticed.”

  “That’s why I need you. Don’t you know who we are?”

  “Chief and Pippi.”

  “The Man and The Woman.”

  After Chief left with Go Bruins and Royce Hall, Pippi went to her bedroom, where she had a closet filled with cartons of cigarettes. She opened a pack, emptied the cigarettes into the trash, took out the silver paper that lined the box, and on the inside cover of the box wrote:

  “Darling, my new name is Pippi” in the inside of the cover of the box. Then she went outside to find a black decorative garden stone that just fit inside the box, and rode her bike down the hill to the Playa. She parked her bike at the perimeter of the invisibly drawn circle around the two statues. Inside the circle, no one rested a bicycle, a Segway, or carried food. It was custom, not law, to cross the line in silence. Outside the perimeter there were usually a few clusters of people having sex, but today, except for one threesome blocked by The Woman’s leg, she couldn’t see any sex at all.

  No one could explain why The Man and The Woman were down here on the Playa instead of on top of the hill beside Chief’s house, but it wasn’t a question that anyone asked except, perhaps, Pippi Longstocking. Why did The Woman dance and why did The Man stand there, so unbending? She climbed the stairs up his leg and into his chest. She had a view over the trees and looked for a particular place at the Fence. As she hoped, no one was close. She wasn’t allowed outside the Fence, by Chief’s orders, and she never went near the gates. She left The Man’s chest and rode her bike to the Fence.

  No one expected anything from Pippi Longstocking. June taught that Chief found Pippi her sometime during the early days and brought her to Center Camp. She was a First Wave rehab, original name lost. She finished the rehab wearing a T-shirt from a special effects company. This didn’t prove she’d worked there, but if that’s what she really was, it didn’t matter. She had nothing to do. There were no movies being made with special effects anymore because there were no movies being made at all. Even watching old movies was difficult. There was a problem with understanding stories. June Moulton said it was a bad idea to watch movies, because the old myths died with the old brains. “In the hero’s journey,” Moulton taught, “the hero had to receive a call to his quest and then fight his father, and people in the audience found connection to those moments. If, as I believe, the Founders left some of us our Silent Voices to guide us, they never tell us to be heroes. Mostly they tell us to be frightened.”

  What mattered to anyone in Center Camp who watched the movies with the movie stars wasn’t the story but the pictures of the old world. No one cared about the actors; they watched the cars on the streets, the crowds in the parks, and the downtown skyline at night, with all the windows lit up. War was interesting. And sex was more interesting, because it was something you could watch on-screen and then do with the person next to you.

  In the leaves at the base of a eucalyptus tree Pippi uncovered a slingshot, with a leather pouch connected to two strips of rubber tubing.

  She took the cigarette box out of her pocket, pinched the inside of the leather sling around it, pulled the rubber tubes back, angled them for the box to go high, and released the pouch. The cigarette box with the message that said

  Darling, my new name is Pippi

  disappeared over the fence in a satisfying arc. She didn’t see where it landed. Then she buried the slingshot in a different place.

  Frank Sinatra, Redwings, Chief,

  Shannon Squier, ElderGoth, Erin

  At the hotel in West Covina, Sinatra wanted to get drunk on bourbon and talk about all-wheel drive Audis, but he called Vayler first, to warn him about the empty food-storage depot.

  “No worries, Frank. We had that open, what, two years ago. Remember, lots of Chinese food?”

  “It’s marked for twenty twenty-eight.”

  “It was raining hard that month and I switched it out for a Costco in Simi Valley, too long a drive in bad weather. I have to say you have a good eye.”

  Frank didn’t say anything.

  Frank went to the bar, trying to remember if the season of Chinese food had been rainy. As he poured his drink, Redwings called and without introduction said, “Copycat tattoos don’t fool me, Frank.”

  “I’m the last to quarrel with you on anything related to painted skin, my good friend, but why need my affirmation about that now?”

  “You know the music Erin sometimes plays real loud at her house?”

  “Redwings, I don’t pay attention to music.”

  “The signatures match, and that can’t be faked. No one good enough to fake it would
fake it, Frank.”

  “I believe you, Redwings. What are you saying?”

  “Guess who found Shannon Squier today?”

  “I could use a hint or better for both.”

  “You did. And Chief wants you at the DMV, right now, toot sweet. It’s her all right, identified by Erin and verified by me because I just saw the tat on her back, and her Smersh matches mine perfectly. Can you believe it? Two Smersh tats in the Fence now, two of ’em.”

  Three years before NK3, Redwings had traveled to Russia just to get a tattoo from СМЕРШ in his Moscow studio. Redwings kept a journal of his adventures on that trip, and by what would have been called a miracle if anyone still believed in God, the ten-page journal, printed for circulation among the members of his club, survived because he’d given it to his rehab doctor, who left it with Redwings before disappearing into the void of NK3:

  This is the story of how I got my smersh tat. How I wrote to Leonid “SMERSH” Sorokin in Moscow, with the help of Beria, a Russian brother from the Moscow charter, who I met at the funeral of the treasurer of the Encinitas, CA, charter, may he Ride Free Forever, who translated my request. I sent the word that I very much admired the smersh tattoo he had performed on the back of the singer Shannon Squier and I so admired the craftsmanship and the meaning of Death to Spies—or as we in the club would say, Death to Rats—that if it were at all possible that I could come to Moscow and have him tattoo nothing but that word across my shoulders, I would pay what he asked. Smersh sent back an e-mail not too long after I sent mine, also translated by brother Beria and therefore he could tell me: “You come, I do. €500.” I thought he meant $ instead of €, but he preferred the € because it was worth more. It’s only money.

  Thus began my adventure of first acquiring a United States passport and then it was off by Delta Airways to Amsterdamn, Holland, where I was met at the airport by a dozen brothers who had also brought a Harley Sportster for me, which normally I make fun of as a bike for women (although it’s a fine bike as my ride showed me) but I was proud to join them on a great run across the flat land of Holland and then to the club house in old Amsterdamn. What a trippy place. Legal hash, just like home. Well time could not be wasted and after we partied in Amsterdam two of my Dutch brothers joined me on a trip from Amsterdamn to Moscow, which took but three days. It blew my mind that the ride from Amsterdamn to Warsaw took a total of twelve hours of actual riding time, which we did in a day and a half. Twelve hours! I can say that I finally understand the Blitzkrieg. Europe is large on the map and small on the ground. And then another few days of easy ridering to Moscow through Belarus where I could see the partisans in the forest if I just squinted my eyes. Think of it! So close the distances between these famous cities and places and yet how many years did it take the Russians to defeat the Germans and get from point A in Moscow to point B in Berlin? I salute the soldiers on both sides of that mighty conflict.