What Came After

by Sam Winston

  The door at the bottom of the stairs was painted with the wheat-stalk logo. The stylized suggestion of amber waves. Behind it was a figure in full camouflage, a patch of that PharmAgra brown and green visible through a reinforced glass window. That well-known brown and green that drew a snicker from the man behind Weller. Like what kind of bumpkin wore an outfit like that. And even when the door swung open and the man behind it turned out to be bigger than any two ordinary men and armed with sufficient firepower to level One Police Plaza and the camouflage he was wearing wasn’t a regular uniform at all but a hazmat suit with dual air tanks on the back and a helmet like a diving bell, the last man kept that amused look on his face. Like he was born to it the way the tall man was born to wear his uniform.

  They handed them over. The one man removing Weller’s handcuffs as roughly as he possibly could. Making a show of it. The tall man taking a manila envelope from the man in the hazmat suit and unsealing it and signing three copies of something. Keeping two and handing one over. Then they went back up the stairs toward the locked door. The door with the big red National Motors star on it. The tall man unlocked it and another one drew it open and they all passed on through.

  * * *

  The man in the hazmat suit didn’t say a word from inside his diving bell. He probably couldn’t have made himself heard if he’d tried, but they were at the end of a long corridor and the door was sealed behind them so there was only one way to go. They went. Warnings on the walls about contamination and a red stripe down the middle of the floor and that individual in the hazmat suit breathing air that hissed in and out.

  They came to a double sliding glass door with another double sliding glass door behind it and a space in between. A clean and shining space paved all over with stainless steel. The first set of doors opened and they went in and the doors closed again leaving the man in the hazmat suit behind. A rushing of air in the little stainless steel chamber. Weller’s ears popped. Penny put her hands up to hers and her father said swallow, swallow hard, and she did but it didn’t help. The other doors opened up and they stepped through into a brightly lit room all white porcelain and smoked glass. A steel table in the center with their packs on it sealed inside transparent green plastic. The doors hissed shut behind them and they sat down because what else was there to do. Plus the air in here felt thin and Weller couldn’t quite get enough of it. He felt a little dizzy. He was glad to see the packs anyway. It was a positive step.

  Penny laughed, pointing to the big white cat encased in green plastic. “Poor kitty,” she said. Weller didn’t laugh because he felt a little bit lightheaded. He thought he felt pretty much like that suffocating white cat in this airless room. Penny wasn’t much troubled, but he was.

  A screen that occupied the better part of one wall buzzed to life. That low piercing hum that intrudes into a room once and then disappears. The image bloomed and became a person moving. Just from the shoulders up. A woman looking downward and handling something out of sight. Adjusting papers maybe, She was half again as big as life, and Penny sat transfixed. As if she were looking through a window into some bigger world. Some world lived in by giants. The woman was dressed in camouflage and she wore the PharmAgra wheat-stalk logo on her collar. Her brown hair was pulled back tight. She looked up from her papers as if she were as surprised to see Weller and his daughter as they were to see her. Surprised and angry about it. She jerked her head to the side and looked out of the frame and opened her mouth and the image died.

  “That’s a television,” Weller said.

  “I know.”

  “A working one.”

  “I know.”

  “The one we have might work I think, but there’s nothing to watch.”

  “Could she see us?”

  “I think so. I think she could. That’s not like regular television, though. Regular television was just for watching. Like watching a puppet show or something.”

  Penny leaned forward in her chair and kept her eyes fixed on the screen, waiting. Her hands reaching out unconsciously to the green plastic film covering her backpack. Touching it and her fingernails seeking out edges and wrinkled places as if she would tear it off if she could without even thinking. Recover what they’d taken from her.

  Her father put out a hand and said she’d better not do that just yet. Leave it alone until we know what’s next. What these folks have in mind.

  The television woke up again and this time the woman wasn’t adjusting her papers anymore. She was done with all that and focused on what she had to say. She was looking straight at them and she didn’t look happy. At them or at anybody. She didn’t look like the kind of person who was ever happy.

  She said welcome to PharmAgra.

  Neither Weller nor Penny made any answer. They just sat. A person who would say such a ridiculous thing might say anything at all and they needed to be on the lookout. Even a child could see that.

  She said she could see them perfectly well on her monitor and asked if they could see her on theirs, and Penny said yes. The woman on the screen said that was good. That was fine. They could proceed, then. She tilted her head just a little to one side and asked if they knew why they were here. Speaking to them as if they were both children. Something below children. Lowering herself to do it.

  Weller said look, it was all a mistake.

  She said one thing at a time please. The way she might say it to a child. She asked again if they knew why they were here.

  “Because I had a little tobacco in my bag,” Weller said.

  She corrected him. There was something of the schoolmarm about her. “Disengineered tobacco,” she said.

  “Disengineered tobacco,” he said.

  “This is all going on the record,” she said.

  “So I would imagine,” he said. “But I can explain.”

  “I’m sure you can.”

  He reached out to Penny and half expected the woman on the screen to tell him not to do it but she didn’t object. He rested his hand on his daughter’s shoulder and she leaned forward on the table, looking at the picture of the white cat. Bored with the screen already or at least done with the woman on it. “I can explain why I had it with me,” he said.

  “I don’t care why you had it with you.”

  “I can explain how I got it.”

  “I don’t care how you got it.”

  He’d begun to perspire. His breath coming harder. Looking at his daughter and seeing her yawning with her head on the table and then looking up at the woman on the screen. “I can tell you who gave it to me,” he said. Thinking he’d turn in that old Black Rose renegade. He had the scar in his neck to prove they’d gotten into it. He could say they’d had a falling out. That whatever agreement there’d been between them was spent.

  “You’d tell me the name of your supplier, would you?”

  “I would.”

  “No sale.” She shook her head. “If he were on the books, we’d know from his accounts that something was irregular and we’d be onto him already. But we’re not, which means he’s a generic like you. Do you know what I mean when I say that? When I say ‘generic’?”

  “I do.”

  “You people are a goddamn enforcement nightmare.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “When you tell me you’ll give up your supplier,” she said, “what you mean is you’ll give me a name I can’t possibly use.” Not talking to him like a child anymore. “Will it be a real name? Maybe. Who cares, as long as I can’t find the person it belongs to.”

  Weller looked down. “It’s all I’ve got,” he said. “I’d hoped maybe—”

  “You can hope all you want, but don’t hope for a second that you’re smarter than I am.”

  The screen cut out.

  They sat. They sat for an hour or more and nothing changed. There was a rest room off to one side, with the same porcelain and smoked glass as everywhere else, and each of them used it. Then they kept waiting. It got hard to judge the passing of time.
r />   The screen came on again.

  The woman on it said in case they were wondering, she wasn’t in any hurry.

  The screen cut out again.

  Penny said she was hungry. Her father said he wasn’t surprised. He was too. He was hungry and exhausted and short of breath but he didn’t say all that. She said there was food in his pack unless someone had taken it out. She said please.

  He tore open the seal and pulled his pack out of its green plastic film. The film was light as air and it slid off the table and fluttered toward a vent in the wall and climbed up to it as if by magic. Or something feigning magic. Fishline. It crawled up the wall and found the vent and stuck there. Penny ran to it but stopped running about halfway and walked the rest. Listless in the thin air. Her father searched the packs. Nothing was where he’d left it although everything was intact, everything except the foil package of tobacco. He looked up to watch Penny taking the green film in her fists and walking back a few feet with it and letting it fly. He said will you look at that. Understanding why it was hard to breathe.

  He let Penny play with the green film for a few minutes and then he asked her if he could give something a try. She was tired anyhow so she let him. He took the film and went to the vent and flattened the film against it. Covering the whole thing. The air in the room didn’t get any better but it quit getting any worse. They ate and they drank some water from the sink in the rest room and they waited until the screen cut back in.

  The woman said once more did they know why they were here.

  Weller said that tobacco.

  She said use your head. She said remember what happened to that truck driver. She asked why did Weller think the same thing hadn’t happened to him.

  Because he was generic already, he said. You couldn’t get any lower.

  “Don’t bet on it,” she said.

  Weller thought the screen might cut out again but it didn’t.

  She said the problem was that those drivers never knew a damned thing. There was no way they could. National Motors put the screws to them twenty-four hours a day. If they got mixed up in smuggling, all it amounted to was picking up some stranger on the highway and giving him a lift. She said what she needed to know was what Weller knew and the driver didn’t. Exactly where he’d gotten the tobacco. Not names, because names didn’t matter. What mattered was the lay of the land. Secret places he knew that nobody else did. And all he’d have to do was lead some people out there.

  Weller didn’t say anything. He couldn’t very well lead anybody to that old elementary school with the fallout shelter underneath it. That was a dead end.

  She said he was a lucky man because if he played his cards right, his daughter would make it home alive. He might not, she had to be honest about that. There might be something different in store for him. But his daughter would be all right. That made him a lucky man.

  Weller said wait.

  She smiled hard.

  Weller put his hands on the table and folded them. He drew breath.

  She kept smiling but it changed a little. Like she hadn’t expected it to go this easily and now here it was. Like now she’d be able to get off work on time. It was an easy smile with some humanity behind it, and Weller saw the difference.

  He said, “My daughter has to come first.”

  She said, “I know that.”

  He said, “I’m only here on account of her.”

  She said, “Don’t bullshit me.” Her smile going away.

  “Honest. I didn’t mean to get mixed up in that business. I didn’t. I didn’t think.”

  “You didn’t think you’d get caught.”

  “I didn’t think period.” Unfolding his hands and reaching into his pocket for the picture. Taking it out and holding it in his cupped hand. He and Carmichael in the middle of the scene, on the bumper of that yellow Hummer, side by side like equals. “I’m here to see Mr. Anderson Carmichael is all. He’s going to help my daughter.”

  The woman gave a look like now she’d heard everything. Like she’d been waiting her whole life to hear everything and now she had. Now she could die happy. She looked away and reached off-screen and looked back. A low noise beginning to rumble beneath the floor.

  “He said he owed me a favor,” Weller said, “and I’m here to take him up on it.”

  The green film against the vent began to stir like it was alive. Like it was alive but dying. Holes appearing in it where the grates were sharp and bits of it coming away and getting sucked in. Weller’s breath came harder. Penny put a hand to her throat. Just like that. That quickly.

  “You people,” the woman said. “We keep the air pressure low in there so contamination won’t filter out. Stray genetic material from whatever you’re carrying. It’s a safety precaution.”

  Weller tried to breathe but couldn’t.

  “It’s also good for other things,” she said.

  Penny lay her head down on the table and yawned and closed her eyes.

  Weller didn’t speak. He lifted up the photograph and held it with one hand but one hand wasn’t enough to keep it up. A single square of paper that heavy. He set it on top of his daughter’s backpack and brought up the other hand and steadied it. Both hands shaking. The air from this sealed room bubbling out of an iron pipe in a rock wall somewhere beneath the East River. Everything he had bubbling out with it. Everything he was.

  “Come in closer on that,” the woman said. But not to him.

  * * *

  Up on the big screen, Anderson Carmichael was wearing a tuxedo. He looked frustrated. The image was wobbly. He was standing in a wide hallway somewhere with brocade curtains and flocked wallpaper. Soft lights high overhead casting long shadows and showering down trails of light like coins falling. Chandeliers. They flickered past every now and then when the camera moved and Carmichael jerked out of the frame and something else took his place. Chandeliers and carpet and people moving. A red sign lit up reading EXIT.

  Weller had just about come around.

  Music was playing, a big sound filtered down tight through some little microphone and coming out all scratchy in this hard room of glass and tile.

  Penny was standing over by the vent picking up and dropping the green plastic film to no avail, now that the vent was off. She asked her father if he was done with his nap and he said he was. She asked what happened to the lady on the television and he said he didn’t know.

  On the screen Carmichael disappeared and everything went black but the sounds kept up. The music a little bit muffled and something rubbing like fabric now and metallic sounds as well. Carmichael’s voice saying excuse me excuse me excuse me. Then the picture coming back and everything pinwheeling around all at once. Creamy tile and red marble black as blood. Harsher light. Carmichael in the frame against white tile steadying what must have been his phone against a wall or a door. His voice echoing. “You have no idea,” he said.

  Weller didn’t know whether to be thrilled or alarmed.

  “It seems you’re being auctioned off,” Carmichael said. Staring right through Weller. “Somebody thought I might be interested.”

  “I’m glad to hear you were,” said Weller. Hardly believing but believing anyhow. A dream come true.

  “I didn’t say that. I didn’t say I was interested.” Sounds echoing from his end of the connection. Men coughing and water running. “Honestly,” he said. “You people.”

  “But.”

  “You people have no idea. Rigoletto starts in five minutes and I get this call and I take it because somebody’s assistant tells my assistant it’s important.”

  Weller opened his mouth.

  “They tell me a friend of mine has run up against PharmAgra security. They want to talk to me about money and I say hell no patch me through to my friend, and this is what I get. You. Unbelievable.”

  Weller said, “You remember me, though.”

  “I don’t mind saying I feel badly used.”

  Weller opened his mouth.

  �
��Badly used. Rigoletto in five minutes—four minutes—and why somebody thinks I’d want to bail you out is beyond me. You deserve whatever you get.”

  Weller said the call wasn’t his idea.

  Carmichael kept on. Saying Weller deserved worse than that. Worse than whatever he’d get. Picking up speed because the music was coming up louder and the lights had already flashed once and he was torn between finding his seat and getting this out of his system. Too angry to hang up and knowing it and angry at himself for that and that making it worse. What in the world got into these people.

  Weller said making the call wasn’t his idea, and neither was whatever anyone had said. He’d just shown them the picture was all. The picture that Liz had taken. He raised it up again like a talisman. Penny coming over and standing alongside him, that green film trailing from her fist. Weller saying whatever call they’d made and whatever they’d said was their doing and not his. He was sorry but it wasn’t his doing.

  Carmichael said oh for Christ sake you brought the kid. Is that what smugglers do now? Three minutes to Rigoletto and I’m talking to an idiot who’s smuggling tobacco with an innocent little kid along to learn the trade. Saying he’d had a higher opinion of Weller than that but he guessed he’d been wrong.

  Weller said he wasn’t smuggling anything. Honest. He’d come to cash in his IOU. Holding the picture up again, as if it had value independent of what the man on the screen might decide it had. Any value beyond Carmichael’s merest momentary caprice.

  Carmichael checked his watch. He looked back at the screen studying it and looking absent at the same time. He might have looked at Penny standing there with her deep blue eyes and her fistful of pale green plastic. He might have thought of his own son and that Polaroid. Who knows. Rigoletto in two minutes and he said all right. Consider that IOU cashed in. I’ll bail you out. But not until intermission, so you can just cool your heels.