NK3

by Michael Tolkin

  He walked through dark streets and alleys where he could follow the strange sound—new to him but intelligible, of people cele­brating life—until ahead of him were the bright lights of Figueroa Street, where every night was a party, where no one was hungry, where everyone was drunk because the Founders had so generously left the survivors enough alcohol to keep the world buzzed for another thirty years or ten thousand.

  Hopper walked slowly down the middle of the street, copying the unsteady weaving of a few drunks stumbling on their way to take a piss against a dead cash machine beside the entrance to a Bank of America. When they peed he took a place at the wall beside them, and also peed. They nodded at him and when they left, he followed them to the festival of light that was Figueroa. He was in the crowd now, and no one cared.

  The First Wavers owned the night. Only First Wavers could ride Segways to roll and pivot through the crowd. They were the careless ones and also the most polite, with exaggerated good manners, stepping out of each other’s way, or out of the way of the Second Wavers, giving their place in the food or liquor lines to those behind them.

  His Silent Voice told him: “No one cares you’re here. Eat something.”

  Hopper stood in line at a fish taco truck and took the plate the server handed him. His Silent Voice reminded him: “No alcohol.”

  Down the block, a hundred men stood shoulder to shoulder in a circle, knocking their bottles together in a steady pulse, and in the center of the circle were five naked women, skipping from foot to foot and shaking with no connection to the beat of the ringing glass. Their clothing lay in the street around them. Hopper’s Silent Voice told him to walk away. Hopper asked the First Waver next to him about the women. “What is this?” asked Hopper.

  “Where have you been?”

  “I was in Long Beach.” This is what the Teacher told him to say if he was asked.

  “They don’t bottle bang in Long Beach?”

  “I forget.”

  The First Waver said, “Welcome to your better life, friend. These are what we call Shamblerinas. Barely any rehab or maybe even no rehab. The ones with the least rehab, they can’t hold their booze. They get drunk but they don’t have any inhibitions to lose because they don’t have anything restrained by social convention. It’s like no offense, but you would never understand a joke unless you’d been through full rehab, like I have. Like only a few of us have. We keep these girls around for giggles. They’re nice to look at naked, right? They’ll sleep it off and in the morning they’ll be out here, sweeping up the broken glass. They don’t mind being naked like this. And you can just fuck them.”

  “Do they like it?” asked Hopper.

  “How could anyone measure that? I’m an expert in mechanical systems, especially electric motors. In advance of gas running out I have a specialty in electric cars. I’m Tesla, DMV motor pool, but out here they call me Papa BangBang. Papa BangBang of the Bottle Bangers. My boss doesn’t like this, okay, fuck him. He’s got a Driftette, borderline Shamblerina, to himself and thinks he’s an important man. Well, I was one of the first to go through rehab at UCLA.” He pulled up his sleeve to show Hopper his )’(. “I earned this. Doesn’t that make me an important man? Who are you?”

  “Nole Hazard,” said Hopper, as his Teacher told him to say.

  “Nole, I’m drunk. Are you drunk?”

  “Drunk enough,” said Nole. “Good answer,” said his Silent Voice.

  Two of the women bumped into each other, knocking one of them to the street. The others paid no attention, bouncing from foot to foot, slapping hands to bare breasts, eyes scanning without focus, without attention to the woman who fell onto the broken bottles on the street. Blood dripped from the side of her mouth. She raised herself to her hands and knees, face toward Hopper. He showed her the ring on his left hand.

  “Did you ever wear a ring like this?” She didn’t answer and he asked again in a louder voice, in case she hadn’t heard him over the ringing of the bottles as the men made the other four women dance. He bent down, kneeling on one leg. “Did you ever wear a ring like this? On that finger?” He squeezed the ring finger on her left hand. “Yes? No?” She was too drunk to understand and one of the other women tripped over his foot and fell across her. The second woman used the first woman’s head to steady herself. The bleeding woman couldn’t answer Hopper’s question about the ring and collapsed once again to the street. Hopper wiped her bleeding mouth with the T-shirt from the nearest pile of clothes.

  Tesla stopped him. “What are you doing? Don’t mess with the Shamblerinas, Nole. It’s not how we do things down here. You should know that, or tell Papa BangBang why you don’t know that.”

  “I do know that,” said Hopper, as his Silent Voice ordered.

  Hopper left Tesla and looked for a hotel with an empty room. The Ritz-Carlton had the best view to the south and west, but the hotel was for verified First Wave only. The Marriott was for First and Second Wave. He tried three hotels, the Marriott, Embassy Suites, and the Standard, and walked ten blocks up and down Figueroa and a few blocks to the side before finding a room at the Hilton.

  His Silent Voice said, “Their hotels weren’t supposed to be this crowded. Ask them why.”

  The desk clerk was in her twenties, with braided blond hair. She wore a hotel maid’s uniform and a name tag that said CECILIA.

  “Cecilia,” Hopper said. She didn’t respond. He said it again.

  She looked up. “I forgot.”

  “Forgot what?”

  “Forgot my name is Cecilia.”

  “It says Cecilia.”

  “I know.”

  Hopper’s Silent Voice dictated what he should say. “My name is Nole Hazard. I failed verification.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I’m here to work.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I’d like a room. On a high floor, facing south.”

  “Twenty-sixth floor.”

  “I appreciate that. Thank you.”

  “How many keys?”

  “One. Just for me,” said Hopper.

  “Housekeeping every three days. The room will be dirty. Sign.” She gave him a ledger book.

  He signed for the key card, Nole Hazard. She handed him a key card. “Put it in the door, wait for the green light, open the door.”

  His Silent Voice told him to ask a question, “Is it always so hard to find a room?”

  “The Burn.”

  “The Burn what?”

  She couldn’t explain. He thanked her.

  The elevator knocked and rattled on the way up. It smelled of Clorox and cigarettes. A placard from before announced that there would be live music in the bar on Friday and Saturday nights, from a band called Sausalito. There was no live music anymore because no one could play the instruments.

  The hallway on the twenty-sixth floor was badly lighted. He found the room and opened the door.

  The lights in the room worked. The sheets were stained; there were empty bottles piled in the corner. The shower was hot.

  Hopper opened the sliding glass door to the balcony.

  Something out there in the shadow, over West Adams or Crenshaw, cast an invisible hook on an invisible line, tugging Hopper’s heart toward the center of the void. Nothing was any clearer except the command to follow the line to its source, or die.

  He told his Silent Voice: “I’m tired. I need to sleep. I traveled hard to get here.”

  His Silent Voice said, “Go to sleep. You shouldn’t do this at night, anyway. You need to see where you’re going. It’s dangerous enough.”

  Franz, Eckmann, Spig Wead,

  Seth, Marci

  Eckmann returned to the pilot’s cabin with the oldest man in the crew. “Franz, this is Spig Wead, he’s our electronics engineer and he’s been in charge of the cockpit.” Wead had sparse hair and a back that always hurt
him and he walked slowly. He accused everyone of incompetence though his own had never been proven.

  “I’ve read the manuals and run the tests and everything works. I could probably fly it but with you here I’m your copilot. I’m in the seat on the right.”

  The cockpit windows were covered in heavy black cloth. Seth watched from the cockpit entrance. They’d long ago removed the heavy security door. Marci sat on the flight attendant’s jump seat, lost in the mayhem of her thoughts, because she missed AutoZone. He had almost given her a good name and she wanted that more than she wanted to be on the plane. She missed the adventure of the motor pool. She could look back on those days and remember different moments, as though they were tires on a rack, there for her to touch. For the first time since her rehab, she had a past to long for.

  Franz sat in the left seat in the cockpit, pushing the controls for the wing flaps. He asked Spig Wead to continue doing this so he could step outside of the plane and watch what he was controlling. When he was behind the plane the signal was given to Spig Wead and the flaps moved in and out.

  Wead explained, “This will slow your airspeed and this will also help you climb. And did you know that we shouldn’t land with full tanks of gas? I read that in the manual.”

  “I hope we won’t make that mistake,” said the pilot.

  “A full load of fuel can get us to Europe.”

  “Is that where we’re going?”

  “I don’t know. Eckmann won’t say.”

  Seth watched Franz with an expanding anticipation of doom, as under Eckmann’s confident directions, the pilot believed that these simple rehearsals in a covered hangar would successfully translate into controlled flight. Doctors were intelligent people; he could see that from the equipment he once understood. Airplanes were complicated. Medical equipment was also complicated. He trusted that his brain, however degraded by NK3, was still better in proportion to the brains of those around him. Then he caught his thoughts and reversed them, impressing himself with his willingness not to hold to an idea to avoid feeling lost in the emptiness between one conviction and its replacement. If doctors are smart, so must pilots be smart, in proportion to the rest of the brain-damaged world. If so, and Franz still has brain power, then Spig Wead, a mechanic and also therefore a smart man, is acting prudently.

  So I should go with them, he thought. And be close to Marci.

  He looked at Franz as a scared and injured man. Franz needed his help.

  Eckmann climbed into the jump seat behind the throttles, going through the manual to determine the function of every button and dial, puzzled by the way everything on the gauges on the screens above the pilot’s seat was matched by the same instruments above the copilot’s seat. They weren’t sure what to do about this. Should they perform the same function at precisely the same time, or was it enough for one of them to make the change on his side of the plane?

  When they met this kind of dilemma, Eckmann told Franz to close his eyes and feel his way to the answer. Franz then closed his eyes and waited for a moment of sudden clarity, something that made immediate sense of the confusing elements of the cockpit.

  Wead thumbed through the manual. The manual’s illustrations showed the correct alignment of the gauges, but there was no function in the cockpit to simulate a flight and show what the wrong positions looked like.

  “Franz? Eyes still closed?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re going into a stall. We should be at four hundred knots but airspeed has dropped because the speed sensor has frozen and without knowing it, headwinds have slowed us to two hundred and thirty knots. We’re losing lift. What do you do?”

  Franz steadied his hand on the wheel.

  “We’re slowing down, Franz, the tail of the plane is dropping. We’re going vertical, about to fall tail-end first,” said Eckmann calmly.

  Seth pulled the lever to release Franz’s seat, which flopped backward. Franz watched his hands reach forward to push the pillar away from him, still with his eyes closed.

  “I think that’s right,” said Eckmann. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but when the plane is falling, you push down on the nose to get lift again.”

  Franz pulled the pillar in and kept it there, as though climbing. He bounced a little in his seat, pulsing in time to a steady turbulence only he could feel. Seth asked him: “Are you tired?”

  Franz nodded.

  Seth put a hand on the wheel.

  “He’s flying,” said Eckmann. “Why are you making him stop?”

  “My patient is tired. He needs to rest. Ten minutes. I want him to drink some water and have some food.”

  Marci pushed a reluctant Eckmann from the cockpit to the stairs and told everyone else in the galley and first-class cabin to leave the plane.

  Franz didn’t want to talk after the others were gone. He just sipped water and ate three small bags of hickory-smoked almonds and then returned to the cockpit alone, closed his eyes, took the wheel, and pretended to fly.

  Shannon Squier, Erin

  Outside her bedroom door, Erin told Shannon: “Close your eyes.”

  Shannon refused.

  Erin said, “You have to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the surprise.”

  “I don’t want a surprise.”

  Shannon reached for the handle of the chisel before she remembered the chisel was gone. She wanted to plunge the sharp end into this woman’s eyes, not deep enough to kill, just to blind her and kick her into the streets screaming. It was something she’d done a few times, and afterward walked in a foam of mirth.

  “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do, Shannon, so here.” Erin opened the door to her bedroom and her shrine to all things Shannon. “After you, please.”

  Shannon walked cautiously into the room, prepared for a surprise that might be violent, but Erin stayed a few feet away, respectfully waiting for Shannon to respond to what Erin was showing her.

  “This is you, Shannon,” said Erin. The walls of the room were hidden behind pictures of Shannon Squier on magazine covers, in newspaper articles about her, in framed photographs of Shannon Squier in concert, along with framed stubs of concert tickets from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, São Paulo, London, Barcelona, Rome, and Moscow, the CDs and the American, British, and Italian editions of the official autobiography. “I don’t think I went to all those concerts of course, just LA and San Diego. I have pictures from those. My father was in the movie business and he could get me good seats but I don’t know how I came to own the stubs from all those other cities. It’s possible I went but I haven’t seen any pictures of me in any of those cities at any of your concerts. Although my passport shows stamps from France, Germany, Italy, and England.”

  “You’re saying this is all me?” asked Shannon.

  “Now you get it!” Erin clapped her hands. “Yes, yes, this is you, all of these pictures, all of this music, here: this is you at the Grammys. And over here is the special picture, the most special picture of all.”

  On the nightstand beside Erin’s fluffy bed was a photograph of fifteen-year-old Erin standing next to Shannon, with Shannon holding the three Grammy Awards she’d won that night. The picture was autographed:

  To Erin—Choose to Be You!

  I love you madly, little one—kisses, SS.

  “Do you understand, Shannon, I didn’t tell you about this before because I didn’t want you to not believe me when I told you, but we knew each other. You loved me madly, you see?”

  Shannon picked up the picture and held it next to Erin’s face. “That’s you?”

  “And you.”

  Shannon looked at herself in the mirror and back to the picture. “That’s me?”

  “Well, with a silver wig and a dress made of plastic steaks, but yes, that is you, and that is me. It’s lucky I have
all of this. And I have your videos collected on a DVD because my father was head of Warner Bros. and Warner Records was your label.” Erin put the DVD into her iMac.

  “Was that your father who found me?”

  “Frank? Oh, God, no, no, but forget about him. Look at this. This is you. The director of the video was David Fincher. He made a lot of famous movies. That’s what it says in your biography. You worked with some of the best directors in the world just five years ago.”

  The video began. Shannon watched the woman on the screen, in a tinsel wig and a short plaid skirt, surrounded by stiff-legged marching robots, singing about life in a submarine.

  “You have the most beautiful voice,” said Erin.

  Now she was outside the submarine, longer than the submarine, spreading her legs for the submarine, now she was inside the submarine, now she opened her mouth wide for a high note and the camera plunged into her throat and now she was on the stage of a large stadium with a hundred thousand fans dressed like her, dancing like her, singing along with her.

  “I don’t have those people inside me,” said Shannon.

  “Of course not,” said Erin. “It took me a while to figure that out, too. This is all stuff they could do with computers. But it’s interesting, isn’t it? Everybody in the world knew who you were. And they will again. I’m going to bring you back.”

  Hopper

  Hopper woke up before dawn. His Silent Voice told him: “You have to do something important today.” Hopper took the binoculars out of his bike messenger bag and opened the sliding glass door to the balcony. The house was out there, to the southwest. The Teacher had shown him photographs, and a map, and tested Hopper until both were certain that Hopper could find it even in the dark, but something was wrong. The map didn’t agree with the city. There was a wall of rubble forty feet high and miles long between two of the boulevards that went from downtown to the ocean.

  Throwing the messenger bag over his shoulders, Hopper went downstairs.