Seven Demons

by Aidan Truhen

  * * *

  —

  Doc days: “Well that went well.”

  “It did?”

  “It absolutely did. Charlie has everything she needs.”

  “Well that is good.”

  “You do not think that is good.”

  “I just think we are the bad guys.”

  “Well we are the bad guys. It’s just we are against the guys who are also the bad guys.”

  “Yeah that’s true.”

  “Do you have everything you need?”

  “I am working out the kinks I am plotting I—”

  “You aren’t ready yet.”

  “Are you?”

  “Charlie says some of the locks are isolated from the main system. She thinks we will need to get a security guy with an eyeball who is alive and hold his face to a scanner for the biometrics.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I think that is the most straightforward way. The system does not confirm with voice or heartbeat so he can be unconscious just so long as he is alive.”

  “Taser?”

  “Medication of course Tasers can be unpredictable.”

  “So can medication.”

  “Tcha.”

  “I guess.”

  “You’re not happy.”

  “I have forebodings Doc I feel there is something I don’t see.”

  “You will see it. That is what you do.”

  “I guess.”

  “You see universes of crime.”

  “Aw shucks.”

  “Call Friday and tell him the Riccardi woman is fine. It will make him happy plus you like him.”

  “…I guess that I do.”

  “Call him. It is nice for boys to be friends.”

  “I don’t know about friends exactly—”

  “Price. It is okay to have friends.”

  “Yeah I suppose.”

  * * *

  —

  VoIP outgoing—

  “Hey Friday.”

  “Mr. Price?”

  “Yeah it me.”

  “You do not sound well.”

  “I have something in my throat.”

  “Oh do you wish to cough? It is important. Many people from countries where coughing is considered embarrassing die every year because they leave meals to cough in the corridor or the bathroom and they die by choking.”

  “They what now?”

  “Jes. It is awful.”

  “…Yeah it is about one of the most worst things I’ve ever heard.”

  “That cannot possibly be true.”

  “…No I guess not.”

  “…”

  “…”

  “Are you injured?”

  “No no I’m fine. Mostly fine I have a hole in me. Two holes actually that are not natural to my basic you know humanity there is one in my leg and one in my neck.”

  “That…does not sound fine.”

  “I just wanted you to know that—I mean yeah there was some stuff—but the programmer lady she is fine too.”

  “O God will she recover?”

  “Jesus Friday no she is fine—she is FINE—like she is fine like perfectly okay. Embarrassed now and a little guilty and she will be really really pissed off when she figures it out but—fine. No injuries and all what you said. No lasting trauma.”

  “…That is actually very good of you to tell me.”

  “Yeah man I’m just a guy trying to get along I keep saying.”

  “Thank you, then.”

  “You’re welcome man.”

  “That is—all?”

  “Yeah man that’s all. I mean hug everyone for me.”

  “…I will.”

  “You don’t have to if it’s weird. It’s weird isn’t it?”

  “Jes. Very.”

  “Okay don’t hug anyone but maybe tell them I said.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “Now I gotta get this done. I’m buying a chair and we’re running out of pigs.”

  “…And inevitably I am sorry that I asked.”

  “Love you man bye.”

  “…”

  “…”

  “It is not like you to speak in this way.”

  “Yeah man Doc is helping me with my emotional well-being I guess. She says it is okay to be friends.”

  “With me?”

  “Yeah I guess.”

  “Well that is—nice.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Jes?”

  “…”

  “…”

  “Bye man I gotta go.”

  “…Goodbye.”

  And then Charlie says:

  “ROOT! ROOOOOOOOOT! I AM ROOOOOT!”

  NINE

  YOU HAVE NOT HEARD A MUPPET ORGASM VOICE until you have heard Charlie’s Muppet orgasm voice. You might think that in a professional setting this is inappropriate but in fact with creative people you have to accept a certain amount of inappropriate. The Muppet orgasm voice is an important part of Charlie’s oeuvre and you do not fuck with the oeuvre.

  “MM MMM MMMMM! OOOOOOOOOHHHH YES! YES YES!”

  And then:

  “I AM ROOT I AM ROOT I AM ROOT!

  “I.

  “AM.

  “ROOT!”

  Charlie puts her head round the door.

  “I am root,” she says.

  “Gotcha.”

  This is genuinely a very good thing it means Charlie has certain powers like total domination over the mere matter of the security system at Kircheisen and these powers are significant. We put i am root in the assets list on the board and Charlie says it like ten more times before Doc writes it in the no column next to crime vagina.

  So now Doc only needs my distraction to be ready and to kidnap a guy and she is all in.

  I need to go to an arcade. With coin-op video games.

  Yes they still have those.

  Incoming call ring ring:

  “Hi it is Banjo Telemark the great artist OR IS IT hello?”

  “Mr. Telemark it is Jacinta Globus good morning you may now leave the house without concern for arrest.”

  “I may?”

  “Yes. I have filed” blah blah law blah blah papers and also blah blah precedent in triplicate ingenuity blah Federal Government v. Go Fuck Yourself 1997 blah blah money power “so that is fine.”

  “O thank you.”

  “You should obviously take care to commit no infractions of any kind even for the sake of art or JONAS task force will almost certainly take full advantage of it.”

  “My art is all entirely legal I assure you.”

  “I am prepared to take that on faith you are a client.”

  “O good.”

  “But I should point out that even an ambiguous situation would afford them the opportunity to arrest you. In the normal run of things I find your approach to art hugely amusing. However in this context I must inform you it would be better if you did not indulge your need to epertay laborjwazay.”

  “I beg your pardon that would be teper zlaborjwa is that Polish?”

  “No it is not Pig Latin Mr. Telemark it is French it means to outrage the straights.”

  “O yes I see.”

  “Do not outrage the straights for another week Mr. Telemark and then we will have all this sorted out permanently.”

  “Thank you Ms. Globus.”

  “You are welcome Mr. Telemark.”

  “Please send me an enormous bill.”

  “Of course.”

  * * *

  —

  I like arcades and this one is a classic. There is air hockey and there is actual Pong and actual Space Invaders and Asteroids alo
ngside all the modern cabinet games which you sit in. There is that thing with the bubbles that you shoot with little harpoons which I have not seen since the ’90s when it was in every airport departures hall on Earth. There are no tickets here and no tokens you just pay and play and the costs are high but honest. Even the claw machine which lets you win marmot toys is honest I win seven marmots in little red hats that yodel when you squeeze them. I also win a bag to put them in because Switzerland.

  Finally I play the Star Wars machine for an hour.

  It is a two-person game and the other position is empty for that whole hour and I spend like a hundred francs during that time because I am not completely great at this.

  Which is a lot until you think about how that is really not expensive to arrange a meeting like this one.

  I hear the scrape as a little plastic box step is dragged along the floor and then I have a copilot or more accurately he has me. He does not try to kill me and I do not try to kill him and that is an acceptable beginning.

  We play without speaking for another hour. My dime of course. I lose track of how many times we win and in all that time he does not die once. He’s like a little tiny Star Wars ninja in an ESA jacket and brown corduroys. If you had to describe him to police you would automatically call him a scamp. Then somehow it’s time and we look at one another as the stuff on the screen just blows up and there’s nothing left to do but talk or try to kill each other.

  “Good game,” Evil Hansel says.

  * * *

  —

  When we have not tried to kill each other for a few minutes I tell him what I want and he says he cannot give it to me.

  So I offer him his heart’s desire because that is what I do.

  It is not until we are done talking and he has gone away into the pinball and the claw machines with the little toys and out into the sunshine like an ordinary little kid that I realize what was bugging me. Whenever I got close enough to notice it, Evil Hansel smelled weird. Volodya always smelled like shoe boxes and bear grease and generic log cabin stinky and it was disturbing at a mammal level because I have read where bad diet like also possibly human ham will make you smell bad and this was not that. Evil Hansel smelled like walking through the hardware department and all the auto air fresheners are open in rows for your motoring cleanliness but that is not it because it is like—like a really bad chocolate box like rose water where there should be caramels and that really amazing praline thing and instead you get rose and orange creams and that disgusting purple one—

  —he smelled—

  —awful—

  —but also familiar—

  —and why am I thinking of sea urchins and the sound of a squeegee? Who washes sea urchins they are what they are—

  And then I get it and I just stare at the air hockey for the longest time and watch the puck go back and forth and back and forth zip zap clack.

  * * *

  —

  Quite a long time ago now in another country when I was young and foolish I did a good thing. I mean it was not a heroic thing but it was basically nice and I will tell you about it now and then we will not talk about it anymore.

  I was getting a train from the city to my mama’s house up along the coast where things were not good economically speaking and little by little the old farms were turning into derelicts and from time to time I guess some guy would buy an old place and make it into a lodge where he could snort coke off his secretaries and make 8 mm pornos and then project them onto his secretaries yes Mr. Farnham I SEE YOU—

  Never mind that now.

  I was getting the train and there was a guy with a backpack he went for the door just as another guy pulled it closed and there was somehow one of those perfect bad moments and the latch was very sharp and it cut off his finger like BLOOP.

  I swear BLOOP or maybe SCHWIPP it is hard to say but there was a tonal quality.

  And then there was the guy screaming and I could not get past him to get on the train and the train was leaving with a great long smear of red across the door panel.

  A bunch of people came and helped the screaming guy and a woman from the local market puts her huge thumb on his artery at the biceps and I was just left there on the platform because I did not know field medicine or whatsoever. Then there were like seven hours to the next train and I had nothing to do so I went and looked for the finger.

  I looked where you would expect like at the tail end of the blood drops and it was not there and I thought did someone get it already? But then I thought maybe the wind blew and it had and there in the hard by the rail was this finger and I picked it up.

  This was the first time I ever picked up a severed human appendage by the way and yeah the first time stays with you.

  I went over to the concession stand to get some ice because I had this idea which is true that you got to put a severed appendage in a cold place. Concession guy would not give me ice unless I paid for a drink and also too I was not to put my gnarly severed appendage on his countertop at any time that was a code violation.

  So I put the finger in my breast pocket and THAT is what those fucking things are for and I put it nail down so that it would not drip gore on me and I bought a soda and a paper towel at like a one thousand percent markup and I left the soda on the countertop and fuck you very much and I went off to the hospital to do my good thing.

  When I got to the hospital with the finger wrapped in ice in a blue towel I went to the main desk and I explained the situation and the nurse practitioner said okay and she called another nurse and he called someone and la la la la and then the cops who were present arrested the shit living shit out of me.

  Because it was not the right finger.

  I do not know why or how and I do not want to.

  But this is the moment that I understood the depth of the world I guess for the first time. I sat in a green triage room on a gray office chair with worn patches on the lumbar support and a tiny wiry cop motherfucker told me that I was holding some other fucking finger and please to give it to him now and I saw the walls disappear and time unravel all the way back to the moment when I picked up.

  The wrong.

  Finger.

  An old cold murder finger.

  And I felt the whole world come back together exactly the same as it always was but I was new.

  Then I spent forty-eight hours in jail instead of at my momma’s house and finally Uncle Teague came to get me and we rode all the way home in his truck and he did not say a word until a mile from my house and then he said:

  “So now you know.”

  And I said:

  “Yes sir.”

  Teague is a Scottish name it means poet and that was the only poem he ever said to me.

  * * *

  —

  In the arcade on the Ahornweg the air hockey goes zip zap clack and it’s sort of another poem I guess if you are inclined to the metaphysical it is a synesthetic poem about details and the world unfolding and exploding in your head and coming back exactly the same like the finger because Hans Eiger did not smell of rose water and nor does Evil Hansel. Not rose water and not chocolate and not air fresheners.

  They have been in a room with Mrs. Van der Zee and her nasty signature perfume and that changes everything because in crime there are no coincidences.

  So now it turns out there are things I have to do.

  * * *

  —

  I sit in front of a computer and I lie to Charlie.

  “Hey boss whatcha doin’?”

  “I am looking at the golfs Charlie.”

  “Golf what?”

  “I like the golfs they are happening in Dubai they have made a whole golf in the desert out of I do not know I assume space science and I am watching on the interwebs come watch too!”

  “Uh no thank you boss I am robbing
a bank over here with Doc.”

  “O good of course sorry my bad.”

  I am not watching the golfs I am murderizing people in futurity. The sort of murderizing this requires is not improvisational it is process-driven it is downstream complexity made simple by stages. Of course it helps that I had planned to do some serious murderizing and so I was already preparing for it infrastructurally speaking but still. But that is my modus: you break it into manageable tasks and you make sure that you assign—

  Yeah.

  Yeah fine it’s how I do. I am doing it the way Karenina taught me to I am finding friendships and connections and names and place I am finding Mrs. Van der Zee and here she is, O and there is Jort also this is his website but now we are looking where are we looking we are looking at…O here is the launch of VDZ-Hatterstadt-Klemp’s new housing project in Dresden how nice and the gang is all here that is to say this is Mrs. Van der Zee and who should be one of the contractors on that project but the young and thrusting firm of Schempp Kosterlitz AG and of course there is no Kosterlitz and only about ten percent of a Schempp they are a shell for another company and another and another all set up by a law firm in Bermuda for use by a firm run out of another shell in London which is owned out of an office in Martinique and la la la la and—

  VoIP outgoing call ring ring.

  “Hi this is Carla at Zebedee Bogotá Reception how may I help you today?”

  “Hi Carla MY but that is quite some voice hello Carla gosh.”

  “Hello sir that is charming of you to say I am sure.”

  “Carla this is Jack Mahboubian I was there at the hotel a little while back it was a LOVELY stay.”

  “Why thank you again sir.”

  “Carla I have to ask you a question and I want a straight answer for which I will pay a great deal of money.”

  “Oh—”

  “No Carla listen I am not even slightly kidding I will give you a million dollars American for usable information and it is not even particularly secret it is just gossip but I need to be sure.”

  “…Are you fucking with me Mr. Mahboubian?”