by Andrew Post
Brody wanted to bring up his idea just to have something to discuss to make the face-first march into the snowstorm more tolerable, but survival training came back to him. Talking while being pelted by lake effect snow and subzero temperatures was not only a great way to waste heat but also a handy way to develop pneumonia. He decided not to vocalize his idea until they got closer to the farmhouse. He was pretty sure Thorp was thinking the same thing, anyway. Operation Ceramic Groom.
With a backyard full of military aircrafts, all they needed were some time and elbow grease and knowhow and they could have a Darter pieced together, up and possibly running in a matter of days.
27
Brody took the front steps two at a stride. He was at the door, hand on the knob, when he realized Thorp wasn’t behind him.
He looked back and saw Thorp standing in the yard, gazing up at the trio of wires looping directly over the house. He stood casually, arms at his sides, face serene. He seemed lost in thought, as one could easily be found on a day much warmer than today. The snow was already filling in his tracks leading to the spot where he stood.
“Hey. You got a key?” Brody asked with his shoulders scrunched up in an attempt to save his already purple ears from further frostbite.
“Yeah,” Thorp said, breaking his trance. He got out his keys.
Thorp was reluctant to step through the front door of his own house, even after walking what felt like a hundred miles in below-freezing temperatures.
When all this was said and done, what would it mean when he had the wires cut down? Would he have to return to working a regular job, going into Chicago with the rest of the commuters? How would he get there? He was unable to get a driver’s license, so would he have to take a cab every morning? But that would prove expensive with no longer receiving a steady income from Hark. He’d have to move back into the city into a cramped apartment sandwiched above, below, side to side by noisy people. He dreaded everything ending and changing.
He wanted to find Nectar—by any means necessary—and if he had to live in the projects after all of this was over, he’d do it. If she were alive and well, he’d do it. If not, he considered fleetingly—if she were dead, as his suspicions itched, what then? A shot of brandy, a trip out to the barn one night once he’d talked himself into it. Rope, a chair. A quick beg for mercy upon arrival. Tip.
Thorp felt Brody watching him and met his friend’s gaze. In Brody’s pumpkin-hued eyes, he could detect a thick sympathy piled there. Thorp went up the rest of the stairs of the front porch and unlocked the front door. He would figure things out later. He’d cross that bridge when he came to it, if he survived that long with a pan of scrambled eggs for brains, that is.
Nothing looked moved or altered in any way. Living alone, Thorp was able to keep close tabs on every object’s proper home and nothing looked askew.
Thorp and Brody didn’t say anything. They filed into the house, went about their way, but it was irrefutable.
It crept in.
The bleak anticipation that at any moment the front door could blow off its hinges, booted feet pouring into the house. Gunfire before any question could be asked or begged. A battering splintering the front door as easily as it would a house of cards. Or the more hands-off approach: bunker-buster shot straight down the chimney, bull’s-eye. Or the more hands-on: A man good with knives who had absolutely no qualms about wet work so long as he could do it with his own personal flair—stop.
Thinking it was not sufficient, he said, “Stop.” Thorp shook his head—those cloying, horrible thoughts, they weren’t his own. In a strange way, it felt all right now, knowing he didn’t own these quick diversions his mind made by the hour every day. They’d been manufactured, installed, whatever the term was. But fear of the next nosebleed, the next pounding headache only alcohol could soothe absorbed that momentary peace he found in the realization. He needed to busy himself. Do something. Anything to just stop thinking for even just a moment.
He went to the kitchen to make coffee, had the pot’s lid open and the coffee ready to be scooped in, but couldn’t concentrate. He left a trail of black crumbs from the coffee can to the waiting pot, the measuring spoon empty upon arrival. He threw it back in and threw his coat back on. Despite his fingers not being entirely thawed yet, he went outside into the cold.
Brody sat by the potbelly stove, watching the snow blow in through the back door Thorp had left open in his quick escape. He got up and closed it. He didn’t need to go out there and chase him down to ask. Brody knew.
Before closing the door and severing the reach of the sonar, he watched Thorp trudge to the corner of the barn and around it to the shed at the far edge of the property to get away from it. Even out there, he’d still be under the net thrown down by the wires. Was it possible to be more affected by something knowing it was happening?
He, too, could feel it.
Lips at his earlobes chanting an inexhaustible string of nonwords, none of them pleasant.
He thought about home. Not his apartment but the home he had grown up in as a boy. He could feel tension ease out of his shoulders and neck. His limbs all felt a foot longer when it all had gone.
Brody emptied his pockets onto the dining room table and took over making coffee. He liked how it felt, doing this simple task, so he watched the coffee percolate up into the glass bubble of the pot. Hovering his open hands near the warm metal of the pot, he thought more about home, zeroing in on the minutiae of that cornflower-blue two-story house on Hennepin Avenue.
The square painted onto the backboard fixed above the garage door. It was the same shade of oxblood left over from painting the doghouse. Him and his dad, shooting hoops. Dad in his overalls, the ones that had his name still legibly stitched to his chest. Grunting jump shot—pockets jangling full of keys, a box cutter, coins, nuts, bolts, washers. Jangling when he made the shot, jangling when he landed on work boots so worn the wink of chrome of his steel toes shone through.
“Got me again,” he’d say, proud.
Brody smiled to himself as he held the backs of his fingers near the speckled metal of the coffeepot. They were so numb he could probably lay them directly on the heated metal and not feel anything initially. He felt miles calmer now, though. He let the coffee continue to brew and journeyed back further through his youth.
Coming home from church on a humid summer Sunday morning in the family car. Resting his chin on his mother’s seat back, complaining that he was so hungry he could eat two horses. She offered to make waffles, and she got a stunned gasp from the backseat in reply. Brody wouldn’t end his list of the things he loved about waffles until they were on his plate.
Once home, there she’d be, Mom in her Sunday best, pouring waffle batter into the waiting metal mouth of the press. “I should’ve waited until I could change before I said anything.” She pinched his nose. “My little bottomless pit.”
Tweaking precisely until the press’s knobs were meticulously set, she flicked a dab of butter onto the metal as a test. If it sizzled, it was ready. She poured in the batter, lowered the handle, and waited with one hand holding it in place—as if the batter might try to spring free. In the amount of time it took that only she knew, she looked down at Brody and winked.
He watched with fascination—she knew just how long to keep that handle down so the waffles would come out perfect. He recounted the trial and error after Dad bought her the press—lifting the lid and seeing the smoking black wreck inside. “Ah, nuts.” But she’d developed a sixth sense for it. Counting to x with “steamboats” after each number? A poem that took the exact amount of time to mentally recite as a waffle to transmogrify from batter to a square of golden goodness?
Mom turned and lifted the press, scraped out the square of fluffy perfection onto a plate. She hesitated. She kept the press lid open, the metal mouth yawning. She adjusted the knob, dropping the arrow down into where the number ten, set in a bolder typeface than the other numbers, waited. Immediately the metal reacted, cr
eaking as it expanded and grew red. Holding the lid open, she turned to Brody. “Can I ask you a favor, sweetness?”
Brody, at nine years, nodded.
“Let me see your hand for a second.”
No.
No, that’s not—that never happened.
Brody took the coffeepot from the burner and went outside with it. He was making a beeline for the barn when he nearly ran into Thorp. Brody held the coffeepot, steam billowing out of the fluted spout. He noticed that Thorp held an axe and faced the south corner of his property. He wore a crown of vapor rising off his shiny pate that shattered whenever a breeze tore by but would always foggily materialize again.
Through the wall of snowflakes, Brody could see it was the wire guide derrick Thorp was facing. He was at a careful distance, as if lying in wait for the derrick to spring from its moorings and dart away—at which point he’d give chase.
“Probably not a good idea,” Brody said. He adjusted his grip on the coffeepot; the handle was a bit warm where it met the pot itself.
Thorp sighed. “I know. But remind me anyway.”
“They’ll know for sure that we know. They’ll be out here in a heartbeat.”
After a moment, “Is it the same for you?”
“Ugly thoughts?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Not sure if I can take it. I’m really not sure if I can take it.” Thorp slid his hand down the length of the smooth axe handle. The head buried itself at his feet. He raised his other pink-fingered hand and clutched his temple, mussing his hair. “It’s terrible. I keep thinking these things about Nectar, about them showing up here—killing me. Killing you.”
Brody couldn’t deny it; it seemed doubly worse. As if Hark had dialed it up to eleven. Before he considered it to be merely an infectious paranoia, but now it seemed clear that something was looming about them, gremlins unseen. Invisible sharks just below the glassy surface of everything—not even so much as a shining wet glimpse of a fin to let you know, yes, it’s something outside doing this to you.
“You have to try and shake it,” Brody said, knowing it sounded as useless as telling a gunshot victim to walk it off. “Focus on something positive. It worked for me kind of. We’ll get this shit out of here soon enough, but we can’t risk attracting their attention until then.”
“They saw me. Tonight when I went to listen in with the radio. The car was stuck in the ice, and they got a good look at me.”
“How?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, was it one of the guards, or were you caught on camera? Kind of a stupid question. You were probably on camera before you even got a hundred feet from that place.” Brody sighed. “Did you let him see your jigsaw?”
“No, but still—I fucked up,” he said.
“Come on. You didn’t fuck up.”
“They know. It’s only a matter of time before they come out here and find us and … I mean, hell, I’m on their payroll. It sure as shit won’t take much for them to figure out where I live.” He dropped his head back and gave the wires a long, exasperated sigh. He shook his head. “And there it is again.”
Although Brody wished Thorp had waited before going off to Hark, he couldn’t really fault him. He’d gotten a lead, and just like him, once that first piece fell into your lap, it was hard not to spring up looking for others. “What’s done is done. It’s not like you did anything, did you?”
“A security guard came out, told me to leave.”
“Big deal, he probably thought you were just sleeping it off before heading home.”
“He told me it was private property, that I was trespassing. He didn’t see my jigsaw, didn’t even talk directly to me—he said it from the other side of the window. But he got a face-map on me.”
“If that’s all, then there’s nothing to worry about. I’m sure we’re still under the radar—”
“They were probably waiting for me to do something like this, get curious, go asking questions about why it was after they put these things up I’ve been feeling so goddamn weird all the time and …”
Thorp pulled the axe from the snow and, accompanying the effort with a shout, heaved it toward the tower. It ate up the distance in plunging sweeps and collided with a hollow bang, not damaging a thing. The echo sang for what felt like a full minute.
Thorp made no move to retrieve the axe but instead set off toward the barn in a lopsided jog.
After the barn door slammed and all Brody could hear was the droning hum of the wires above his head and the occasional shove of blustery wind, he returned to the house. He knew it would be as bad in there as it would be in the barn or standing in the yard. But at least he’d be able to feel his toes.
He was sure to let the warm memories of his childhood home roll to the forefront before passing through the threshold of the farmhouse. He closed the back door but left it unlocked for Thorp.
Slumping onto the couch, Brody removed the sonar, rubbed away the residual stickiness on his forehead, and watched as the last echoes of the wire-frame world about him collapsed into darkness. Operating by feel alone, he opened his e-mail attachments from the messages he had sent himself, absently flipping through them and requesting the ones his blindly guided finger happened to fall upon to be read aloud. He listened to the messages, the strings of numbers and medical jargon that he didn’t really understand, detailing Alton’s brain scans. Then he listened again to the copy he’d made of the Probitas letter.
It’d been a red-letter shit day. He asked his phone to tell him what time it was out of morbid curiosity. It felt like they’d been out for weeks instead of just all night. It was nearly 8 a.m., the day before Thanksgiving and two days before he was due in front of Chiffon’s desk.
As if a personal request in concern for his personal well-being, the phone requested, “Please recharge.” He obliged and found the charge-by-vicinity area built into the face of the coffee table, that spot slightly warmer than the rest of the grain. He set his phone upon it and decided to take the phone’s request personally so he went and poured himself another cup of coffee—knowing it was full by pouring into the cup with his index finger looped down inside—and carefully returned to the couch, minding his steps.
No lenses, no sonar, his thoughts were a mélange of black and white unbidden by any distraction besides the crackle of the wood-burning stove and the sharp twinkle of snowflakes being thrown against the windows. He saw images of his parents and home. Then he imagined the Minneapolis law successfully redacted, cutting short his effort to find Nectar. He was hauled out of prison and stood blind in a courtroom as an ad hoc PR representative from Hark Telecom questioned him in court: “Yes, he is the man on our surveillance tapes, the one who tried to commit corporate terrorism against us.”
For a minute, his mind got the better of him, and he imagined slow demises for Nectar, for Thorp, for himself.
From the vicinity of where he’d left his phone on the coffee table to sponge up some volts, Thorp’s ordi issued a soft two-note chime.
Glad for the interruption, Brody ran a hand over its lid, clearing away the flakes of snow that had melted down to cold, wet hemispheres. He flipped it open and grunted, “Read.”
The ordi began reciting its latest e-mail. Brody’s frustration and worry mounted with each word, but shortly before its end the electronic narrator cut short.
“Read from beginning.”
Nothing.
“Read?”
Unlike his lenses, Thorp’s Gizumoshingu had unrivaled battery life and seldom required a charge. Still, he set it alongside his phone on the warm spot on the coffee table and tried it again, figuring maybe putting his phone so close to it messed something up connection-wise. He tried the ordi’s power button a few times and heard no vent fan whir to life, no string of music denoting a successful powering on. He reapplied his sonar to get a better look at what he was doing; even if he couldn’t see anything on screen at least he could find the ordi
’s power button easier.
He held his breath to listen. The fan for the wood-burning stove was off. The persistent thrum of the refrigerator in the kitchen was gone. He put his hand on the coffee table and felt for that warm spot but found none. Had the power gone out?
Power or no power, what the e-mail was in the middle of telling its intended recipient, Thorp, wasn’t good news. Brody got to his feet and nudged open the door with his foot since he was carrying the Gizumoshingu, two coffee cups, and the steaming coffeepot. He crossed the lawn and was surprised to find Thorp wasn’t in a panic with the entire property’s power off.
He was at the backmost wall of the barn, filling troughs and murmuring to himself. Was he doing this in the dark, perfectly content? Had the wavelength finally etched in that deep?
Thorp turned, keeping one hand on the snout of the horse Brody knew to be Carol, and gave a smile that the sonar pegged for embarrassed. Embarrassed for his earlier display with the axe, Brody assumed. Thorp stared at the Gizumoshingu under Brody’s arm. His apologetic smile turned to a frown.
“Something wrong?”
There was a distinct rumble coming from somewhere in the barn. Before the sonar found the boxy, vibrating shape by the far wall, he smelled the generator’s acrid smoke.
“The barn’s lights, they’re hooked up to the generator?” Brody asked.
“Yeah,” Thorp said. “Why? What’s up?”
“You got a space heater?”
“Right over there. What’s the matter?”
He set the coffeepot and cups aside, pulled the ordi out from his armpit, and held it out for Thorp.
He reached for it with both hands. “What is it?”
“Just read it,” Brody said.
He opened the ordi, the e-mail still on the screen, and read aloud, “‘Mr. Ashbury, it has come to our attention that you trespassed on our property at 12:52 this morning. While you may be one of our cherished customers, we regretfully inform you that Hark Telecom is discontinuing your service effective upon our receiving automatic confirmation that this message has been opened. Please note that any further similar behavior on your part will be met with legal action. Thank you.’” He lowered the ordi. “Think we should be worried?”
