by Dani Lamia
“Incredible,” says Alistair with a small grin.
It’s dark, but the aquariums are glowing, beautiful. It feels like we are intruding, but then again, it’s not like the fish are doing anything important.
I can’t remember exactly where the jellyfish are. We walk through one room and then another. As we approach barred security doors, they open magically and the security systems around us continue to shut down. It is clear how someone else might have used this same technology to sneak in here and plant the box in the first place, or to tinker with the elevator at the Empire State Building in order to engineer the crash that killed Henley.
I wonder how well Alistair knows the security-disarming technology. Is it something he helped create and that he will now be able to track down?
“Didn’t you make this thing?” I ask him, pointing at his game phone. “Isn’t it your design?”
“In some ways,” he says. “But I didn’t design it to be used like this. Also, I’ve never seen it work before outside of my lab.”
We walk through the entire first building but we don’t see any jellyfish. We push open a door to the expansive outdoor exhibits, with Pez leading the way. Outside, there are rock-bounded pens with otters and penguins, all of whom ignore us as we creep past the motion-sensor lights. I see the giant new building that houses the sharks and suddenly realize why I can’t remember where the jellyfish are. The jellyfish building isn’t open to the public yet.
“Cnidarians,” I say. “That means jellyfish. They’re over here.”
We sneak over to the building that has a giant box jellyfish painted on the side below the pronouncement that says “Coming Soon.” Alistair’s phone unlocks the door, like all the others.
Most of the tanks are empty, but one is full of floating, bioluminescent jellyfish, blooming in hypnotic patterns. Alistair looks at me.
“You go first,” I tell him. “That’s the whole point of coming together. So you don’t lose all your lives like Henley.”
“I couldn’t have done this without you,” he says.
He walks up to the tank and holds his game phone up to the glass. The phone bleeps and he looks at the screen. He gives me a thumbs-up. I go next. I hold up my phone and wait for the fateful bleep. I brace myself for whatever might come next. I look at the character screen and see that I am in last place and that I have lost a life.
“That wasn’t so bad,” I say, letting out the breath I didn’t know I was holding.
That’s when the tank explodes.
22
The glass is blown inward, not out, which is all that saves us from being sliced into pieces by the blast.
The concussion still knocks us backward and off our feet. Most of the water drains down the back of the aquarium into some hidden channel, a design feature by an architect who must have anticipated the horrible event of the tank bursting. The room is not flooded, though the splash still soaks us and the jellyfish come raining down around us, helplessly carried by the crashing wave.
It is a small miracle that none of us are caught up in the tendrils or stung as the jellyfish fall all around us. Their tendrils gyrate for a moment but quickly go still as the water recedes. The jellyfish are useless without a current to buffet them. They are glistening jewels on the aquarium floor, dangerous and evil looking.
For a long moment, Alistair and I simply stare at each other, completely shocked, unsure of whether to run or hide. We feel our faces, our hair, our arms, making sure we aren’t cut or bruised. Slowly, we come to our senses. We pick our way around the dying jellyfish. Other small fish in the tank, meant to clean the sides and keep the miniature ecosystem churning, flop around in the pool of brine. The smell of clean, wet salt is overpowering.
Pez got it the worst. The blast flipped him onto his back and slid him into the hallway on his ass, knocking his hat off his head. He is dazed and blinking when we find him and lift him to his feet.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I think so,” he says. “But there’s no reason that I should be. I might have broken my neck.”
“If it was me who got here last, the glass would have blown outward,” says Alistair. “I would have been killed. That’s the message of this catastrophe. The Game Master doesn’t want us to go even one day without knowing that they are in control.”
“What do we do?” I ask, turning around and around. “Do we stay or do we go?”
“We go,” says Pez. “Quickly, before the security guard comes.”
We scuttle out the way we came in. We don’t see the guard. No alarms go off. Possibly this is because the jellyfish house is still under construction and cameras and alarms haven’t been fully installed in here yet, but it is more likely that any alarms have been disabled by the Game Master who planned this ambush.
Soaked, we hop into a cab. The driver is dubious and doesn’t want us to get his seats wet. I pay him a hundred in cash in addition to the fare and he takes us back to the Nylo office with limited grumbling.
“If it was the Midwesterners who did this to us, I want to find out tonight,” says Pez. “I’m going to change my clothes and pick glass out of my knees and take a shower, and then I will come back and pick you up and we’ll go to K-Town.”
While Pez goes home to clean up, I decide to take a shower in my office. Alistair says he’s had enough. He appears to be in shock.
“Can you believe it?” he says, his skin looking even paler than usual. “There will be another clue tomorrow. We’ll have to do this again.”
“We should all stop playing,” I say. “The cops should handle this and we should stop playing this stupid game.”
“You’re right, of course,” says Alistair, mumbling to himself as he wanders off.
I hop in and out of the shower and it’s a good thing I’m quick, because Pez isn’t gone long. He collects me from my office, his lips pursed with determination. I get the feeling he has taken what happened at the aquarium personally. He understands the stakes.
“Come on,” he says. “This isn’t just about you and your family’s money anymore. There’s a real killer out there. I get it now.”
We take a cab to K-Town, just off Times Square. This isn’t the Times Square of my childhood. There is nothing grungy about this Times Square or this Korea Town, at least on the surface. The restaurants and dessert parlors are bright pink and lime green, lit up with neon and festive video menus that showcase barbecue feasts. We walk through the streets filled with drunken but well-behaved revelers as pop music blares from clean arcades and family-friendly record shops.
Pez checks something on his phone and then doubles back to an alley we already passed. We walk down it to a nondescript building entrance and then into a long hallway empty of decoration.
“Is this really the place?” he asks doubtfully, checking his phone again.
We go back outside and Pez looks at the address numbers on the building.
“This is it,” he says, shaking his head. We go back in and march to the elevator. He punches the button for a middle floor. When we get out, we find ourselves in the back of a line for a massive Korean restaurant. We can smell thin slivers of beef burning on open flames, and catch glimpses of people hidden away in private booths, occluded from each other by the high seats. It is a cave-like, shimmering room where patrons are getting drunk on small bottles of plum wine and sake.
“The karaoke rooms are in the back,” says Pez. “But I’ve been told they’re reservation only.”
I catch the eye of the hostess, a young woman with skin so white and glowing that she could be made of pearl slathered in paste, and inconspicuously offer her a rolled-up stack of hundreds. She smiles slightly and nods, taking the bills from my hand casually as she leads us back to the karaoke rooms, glancing over her shoulder to make sure management doesn’t see her taking our graft to privilege us over those with reservati
ons.
“It’s two fifty for a room for the night,” she says when we make it into the back. I let her charge my credit card, rolling my eyes. There are five private rooms, each with a cutout picture of a different Korean pop star on the door. All the rooms are full. The hostess looks at me knowingly and I slip her yet another hundred-dollar bill.
She barges into one of the rooms (full of drunken Russians, not our Midwesterners) and proceeds to have a long, protracted argument with them. Eventually they leave, spitting on the ground, cursing her, cursing us, but also too drunk to actually care very much.
We take over the room and sit there for a minute, unsure what to do next.
Suddenly Pez stands up. “I’ll go investigate,” he says and wobbles off, feigning drunkenness. I watch from our doorway as he barges into each room in turn, pretending to be so wasted that he has forgotten where he is really going. Three doors down he lingers, then looks knowingly back at me. He shuts the door and skitters back down the hall to our room.
“There are five of them,” he says. “They are all beefy men in their early forties, I’d guess, with deep-set blue piggy eyes and greasy beards. Actually, they don’t seem so bad.”
“You like everyone,” I say. “What song were they singing?”
“‘Jolene,’” says Pez, raising an eyebrow.
“Fascinating,” I say, surprised by the choice. Dolly Parton’s not my first pick, but she is classic.
“They were all belting out the lyrics, arms draped over each other’s shoulders. One of them was visibly weeping.”
“Let me handle this,” I say.
We creep over to the private room together. I charge in first, but I don’t say anything until Pez closes the door behind us. I can feel him backing me up and this makes me slightly brave.
The men all stare at me, flabbergasted. I can tell immediately that they know who I am. I try to maintain my composure, to give nothing away, to meet them imperiously on the level of elite privilege that surely I must represent to these pudding-filled sad sacks.
“Gentlemen,” I begin.
One by one, they stand up. They form a semicircle around me, towering over my small frame as if I am a Union major general and they are my staff officers, ready to take a rebel bullet to protect me.
Then, as a unit, they all lean into me, squeezing me in a devastating group hug that nearly knocks me off my feet. They are overcome with emotion. I try to back away, but they lower their heads, leaning on me and leaning on each other, assaulting me with weepy neediness. It is a good thing they don’t seem to mean me any harm because I would be powerless against their coordinated beer-cheese bear hug.
“He was so beautiful,” one of them says. “Just a damn angel on Earth.”
“He put my youngest through beauty school,” another says.
“He got my jaw broke, that son of a bitch,” says an especially burly one, pulling a hand free from the hug so he can rub his close-cropped beard. “But then he paid to have it all fixed up and even made them give me a real chin. Then he bought me a goddang Jaguar car.”
“We miss him so much,” says the clearest-eyed one of the bunch, who also happens to be the shortest and trimmest. “He taught us how to be better men, actually. More humane. More feminist.”
“He also taught us how to be worse men!” chimes in the last one.
Everyone laughs. And it dawns on me that they are all talking about Henley.
This is some kind of funeral or wake for him. I can’t help but be touched that I am not alone in my misery, even if they were the ones who killed him.
“We have to be honest with you,” says one of the beef-eating bruisers. “We came here to the big city to find him and rough him up.”
“To scare him,” says another.
“To make sure he would keep his word and help us bring trans porn into China. It’s our calling in life. Our Don Quixote windmill.”
“We should never have doubted him,” says the one with the new chin.
“He must have told you everything,” says the one who admitted they were here looking for him. “You must already know about our plans.”
“What happened to him?” asks the first one. “Was it the Chinese that killed him? The Russians? Was it really an accident? We are all so confused. We don’t know what to do now or where to go. Should we stay here? Should we go back to Michigan?”
“I’m never going back to Michigan,” says the short man I’ve pegged as their leader. “My wife is in Michigan.”
They all laugh again.
Then there is a long moment of silence. I don’t know quite what to say. It is blisteringly apparent to both Pez and me that these men had nothing to do with Henley’s death. First of all, none of them are even close to the right body type to be the elusive Game Master. Second, their sweaty and overpowering American good nature is almost palpable. These are not conniving killers; these are dopy bruisers.
“He really was very beautiful,” I say. They all hold their breath, wondering why I have chosen to hunt them down and invade their meeting and what other words of wisdom I might impart. “He was also a total asshole. Drinks on me, fellas. Let’s celebrate him properly. Let’s celebrate all the good that he did and all the lies that he told.”
The five huge men cheer so loudly that my heart rattles the bars of its cage.
They all begin singing the chorus to “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” out of key.
“Wait, wait,” says the leader. “Let me find the song in the booklet.”
“No, let her pick the next one!” says New Chin, pulling me in for another hug.
23
Pez and I end up staying out all night drinking with these affable brutes, singing every song we know and telling stories about Henley.
The sly and cunning hostess gives away the room I generously bribed her for to a different band of surly and emaciated Russians with gold teeth and Caesar cuts. You just can’t trust anyone in the service industry anymore.
Hanging out with these Michiganders is therapeutic. I learn all about Henley’s adventures in China, about how he has made friends and enemies in the vast expat community there.
More information only confirms that none of these men had anything to do with Henley’s death. They are fun-loving, good-natured doofuses. The only reason they would have come into contact with someone like Henley would be because they were all out of place and feeling homesick at the same time in the same place.
All of these burly men are very passionate about getting gay and transgender porn into China. Eventually we get so drunk that we start brainstorming ways to make this happen using various NGOs and printers that Nylo uses to make games in China. I am just as seduced by them as Henley must have been.
Eventually, Pez excuses himself, saying that he has to sleep if he means to keep investigating in the morning.
I can see why Henley and these men became friends. I can see why he wanted to help them out, even if he oversold his ability to do so. I do wonder if there might have been somebody else involved in all of their plans. Somebody who remains hidden. An agent of China determined to prevent their smuggling operation, perhaps, but unwilling to commit any crimes in China, thereby preventing an international incident. Waiting until Henley came here to make a move against him.
I just don’t know enough yet. I finally excuse myself, deflecting their drunken pleas to stay, and get a car back to the office. I take another shower and eat some old pastries that were left in the break room. An entire roast chicken has been delivered as a death gift, along with some fingerling potatoes. I open the plastic clamshell and pull the meat right off the bone, alternating with bites of cold potatoes spiced with rosemary and garlic.
I pass out fully dressed in my bed. I only manage to sleep for two hours or so before Peter gently wakes me up, a concerned look on his face.
“Just let me
sleep,” I moan. “I’m sick.”
“It’s the police,” he says. “They are in your office waiting. They say they have some questions for you.”
“Fine,” I say, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. “Tell them I’m coming.”
I rouse myself and grab a carbonated iced coffee from my refrigerator and drink it down. Then I crack open another one to sip more casually.
I wash my face and put on some makeup. Maybe these police will finally have a lead.
My office turns out to be extremely crowded. Two giant bald men with earphones are standing by the door, hands behind their backs. They must be my new security detail. They don’t look at me when I enter the room. I can see the bulges in their suit jackets where they’re concealing guns or Tasers or cans of Raid or whatever.
Detectives Jay and Rutledge sit across from my desk, lounging in chairs with their legs crossed, sipping giant cups of coffee and eating glistening, gooey Danishes that Peter must have brought them.
I sit down behind my desk. My brain feels soggy and soft. I turn the air conditioning up as high as it will go, hoping that maybe the extreme cold will wake me up.
“Officers,” I say. “Did you catch the person who killed my brother and who is trying to kill all the rest of us?”
Rutledge and Jay exchange a look. “We’re working on it,” says Jay. “It’s all part of a process.”
“What does that mean?” I ask. “Do you have any leads or not? Were you able to trace these game phones or figure out who this Game Master might be?”
“We are analyzing all the data down at the lab,” says Rutledge. “You really have to trust us that we are on top of everything here.”
“So what do you want from me?” I say, taking a sip of coffee. “You got my statement, right?”
“Yes,” says Jay. “We got your statement. We got your statement and all the other statements.”
At that moment, Angelo Marino bursts into the room, making the office just a little more crowded. He seems out of sorts. His eyes are popping out of his head with tension, but he smooths down his suit jacket and slicks back his hair before speaking. “You don’t have to answer any of their questions.”
