by Jesse Karp
“I have some ideas,” Mal said.
They stood in the room like cowboys about to slap down for their guns. The shorter one stared hard at Mal with cruel invitation.
“All right, then. I guess we’ll see you soon.” When the gray man said it, the shorter one opened the locks and stepped out into the hall. The gray man took a step backwards, then spun neatly, militarily, on his heel and walked out. The shorter one reached back in, leered wolfishly at Mal, and swung the door closed.
Mal stood still for a full minute, then locked the door. He went to the window and leaned on the edge and rested his head on the bars as he looked down into the street through the tinted glass.
“Do you really?” Rose asked after the silence had held too long for her.
“Really what?” Mal said, turning to her.
“Really have some ideas?”
“Yes,” he said, and lifted his hooded sweatshirt from the floor and pulled it over his solid frame, which did not seem to take up quite as much space as it had before those other two paraded through.
“I’ll come with you,” she said, rising from the bed.
“That’s”—he looked down to slip his feet into his sneakers and then back up—“not a good idea.”
Rose stood across from him, quiet in the semi-dark. She watched him swaying, like he was balanced on the edge of a precipice. Through the camouflage of her hair, her eyes found his and held.
“Come on,” he said, turning toward the door.
Mal walked them through the city with what appeared to be no goal. They stopped in a datacafé for ten minutes, went into a store, and moved through aisles of cell upgrades for twenty minutes, then sat down in a quiet courtyard abutting a corporate tower until after half an hour Rose roused Mal from the bench he had nodded off on.
He looked around himself and blinked at the aggravating sunlight that the high windows beamed down into the courtyard.
“That should be enough,” he said. It had all been to confuse the people who were tracking him, she realized, to camouflage his real destination. He stood up and led her away, his limp exacerbated further by the downtime. He wouldn’t go into the subway, despite her suggestions. They walked.
Midtown gleamed, the tall pinpoint towers reflected both in the mirrored surfaces of their neighbors and in the dark lenses of the thick crowds clogging the streets. Every third or fourth person here was wearing cellenses, doing business in the privacy of their own heads, instinctively dodging others caught up in the same distraction. Mal held his place, an unyielding stone in the midst of a flowing river. He stared hard across the street at the glass and chrome façade of a particular building. To Rose’s eye, it differed in no particular way from those around it: tinted glass windows and doors, mirrored chrome frames, the address built up sculpturally over the door. Two plants were set on either side of the door, some kind of homage to the idea that actual living things were good, or at least looked pretty sometimes. Two women perched on one, eating their lunches and gazing out at the crowds in dull silence. At the other, a man finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in the soil.
Rose had known Mal long enough now to see that his reaction to this building was inexplicably extreme. There was a strain in his shoulders and jaw that, on anyone else, Rose might have attributed to fear. Mal did not want to go into that building.
“Are you sure what you need is there?” she asked him. Her voice, even amidst the din of the streets, was little more than a whisper. Somehow, he always heard her.
He turned to her with the eyes of someone lost in a memory.
“Mal?” she prodded. Staring right at her, he seemed to not be there at all. She reached over and put her warm hand around his, and his eyes immediately flooded with their dark, guarded life; then he flinched his hand away as if stung.
He turned and marched across the street, a soldier going to his death. She hurried to catch up, weaving between the cars that he simply ignored. At the doors, he stopped. The reflection of his face showed nothing, but he stood before the doors unmoving until, finally, they opened and disgorged a group of men in suits, who blew past them as though they were invisible. As the door closed, Mal’s eyes flickered over the sights within.
“It’s just a lobby,” he said, and she was not sure he was speaking to her at all.
He gripped the handle, and as if it were an action requiring some massive exertion, he set his body and pulled.
The door opened into the cool, regulated air of what was, indeed, a lobby. They stepped onto light blue tiles with silver swirls, an ocean of them covering the entire massive atrium. Elevator banks opened up on either side; small snack shops were built into the walls, each with a uniform appearance and interspersed with HDs, advertisements, and stock reports marching along the top and bottom of each screen. At the center, down a short flight of stairs, was a gurgling fountain that felt somehow even more artificial than the lobby around it. This was a place built out of profit and trade. A body of water in the midst of it was a comment on how insignificant nature really was. Yes, remember water? Quaint, little nature? Here’s a little bit of it to amuse you.
Directly before them was a high desk, with three big men in dark blue blazers sitting behind it. Even though all three had dark cellenses covering their eyes, it was not difficult to tell who they were looking at.
Rose felt cold and hollow when even casual eyes found her. She squirmed under the scrutiny and looked at Mal, who was oblivious to the attention. He was taking in every detail of the bland, empty artifice of the place.
“I believe you’re in the wrong building,” said one of the three men. Mal was in cargo pants and an old, hooded sweatshirt. Rose was in jeans and a T-shirt, huddled in a worn leather jacket two sizes too large for her. Every single other person in the lobby was wearing a suit.
Mal looked at the man squarely and stepped forward.
“A man outside, down the block,” Mal said. “He’s yelling at people about how oil is destroying us. He’s got some spray cans.”
The man’s clear suspicion of them clicked into a different gear, as he yielded to his allotted role. How else could it be, Rose realized. His stiff face, his plastic eyes. The man was a robot, programmed for specific duties. Mal apparently knew how to reprogram him.
The man rose, as did another of the three, and they hurried from around the desk toward the doors. The third man’s attention was hyperfocused inside his cellenses, and he started speaking into the air.
Rose moved forward, impelled by Mal’s strong hand on her back, not fast, but not slowly. She saw the small black globes on the ceiling, cameras capturing them so that when this proved to be a false alarm, their images could be studied.
They stepped into an elevator with a small group of people who might have been curious about them if they had bothered to notice them at all, but each was trapped in his or her own private conversation, one of them disclosing hideously private details of his marriage, as though he were sitting in the privacy of his home.
Mal’s hand came out, and his finger hovered over the single button at the top of the rows, the button for the top floor, and then pressed it.
The mirrored doors opened onto a cool hallway, all waves of blue and silver, like a stylized ocean. The waves swooshed to the end of the hallway, where the space opened into a suite of offices, a curving desk carrying the same blue and silver motif. An icily beautiful woman with precise features, cellenses, and a stiff sculpture of brown hair crowning her head sat beneath swooshing silver letters that read SILVEN ASSOCIATES.
Mal walked toward the desk, and Rose kept pace two steps behind.
“Can I . . .”—a perceptible pause emphasized the receptionist’s distaste—“help you?”
Mal gave no indication of offense nor, in fact, of the woman herself, as he blew directly by her and around toward the rows of silver and blue offices.
“Excuse me,” the woman’s voice became shriller. “I’m calling security,” she warned as Mal disappeared f
rom her view. Rose, trailing just behind him, glanced back helplessly at her.
Rose was at once intimidated by the perfection of the space—the flawless design, the spotless tiles, the calm lighting, the luxurious couches and coffee tables in the central waiting area, the perfectly balanced climate—and weirdly disgusted by the astonishing expenditure of money on something of such sheer artifice. The cost of a single lush couch or streamlined glass and chrome coffee table could have put her in a better apartment for a year. And all to create the illusion that everything was under control, that the world was in perfect order.
Which it clearly was not, as first one, then two, then four heads turned or poked out from office doors. You could see by the flat restrained expressions that Mal and Rose were as unwelcome here as a foul smell; vulgar, sweaty reality invading the sealed-off world of privilege.
Mal stopped dead in the middle of a small open lounge space and looked around at nothing in particular.
“Who are you looking for, sir?” A young man in neat gray slacks and a crisp white shirt had deigned to remove his cellenses and was addressing Mal.
Mal turned toward him and took a step forward, causing the man to flinch back as though dodging a punch. But Mal walked right by him to meet a phalanx of men in blue blazers stepping out from the front and arraying itself before him. Was one of them the man from downstairs that Mal had lied to? With their cellenses, standard outfits, and flat, expressionless faces, it was impossible to tell.
Mal, of course, did not slow his progress. His limp grew more pronounced as his body tensed. He was intending to plow right into them, ignite an explosion when all they wanted him to do was leave.
“Mal,” Rose said, her face going red as attention turned on her. “Don’t.” She could barely bring herself to speak now that people were looking at her. But Mal was in no condition to fight. Two days ago, she had bandaged wounds on him that would have sent other people speeding to the hospital, if not straight to a morgue. But he wasn’t slowing. He just was not built to register any other choice.
The men tensed, the outside two beginning to circle around, to catch Mal between four points. Mal’s hands came up. The front two men began to glide forward.
“There will be absolutely none of that in here,” a voice from down the hall cut across the scene so sharply that everybody froze and all eyes shot to the source.
A young man radiating confidence from his platinum hair to his quiet, evaluating eyes to his firm jaw and gym-sculpted body beneath a rich black suit stood at the end of the hall, waiting for the world to fall into place properly.
“Mr. Silven,” the receptionist explained breathlessly from behind the phalanx of frozen men. “They walked in unannounced.”
Silven’s eyes were already on Mal, picking him apart like an equation. Mal was looking back, unimpressed but curious, as if there was something about Silven’s appearance that was not patently clear, like there was something Mal was looking for just beneath the surface.
“Well”—Silven’s tone seemed enough to put the room at ease—“let’s rectify this without damaging any of the furniture, shall we? Young man, why don’t you come into my office?”
The calm that encompassed the room was immediately replaced by confounded concern.
“Mr. Silven?” a voice went out.
“Sir?” said one of the men in blue.
“This way, if you please.” Silven beckoned Mal to the office at the end of the hall, and his eyes encompassed Rose as well.
Mal straightened, having apparently found what he was looking for in Silven, and he walked over. Rose, caught frozen in the confusion, shook herself free an instant later and hurried after him.
They entered an expansive office that carried the silver and blue motif in from the outer halls. The wall-size window here afforded a view between the mirrored forest and onto the city itself, straight down to the gleaming dome many blocks away and the needles of the five-spired Lazarus Towers behind it. A plaque outside the door read ALAN R. SILVEN III, CEO.
Silven closed the door behind him and, without sitting down at his intimidating desk or even taking another step into the carpeted room, spoke quietly.
“Mal,” he said in an urgent tone, “why did you come here, of all places?”
Mal looked around him somberly and dropped heavily on a leather couch near a bar in the wall. Rose could see that the journey here had depleted the last of his resources. He was struggling just to keep his eyes open. Rose herself was struggling to remain hyperaware, to gather every word they said and parse some meaning from all of this.
“Maybe the same reason you did. I needed to see that it wasn’t here anymore,” Mal said, plunging things even more deeply into mystery.
“It’s not,” Silven said. “Of course it’s not. This isn’t even the same building. They put this up afterward. It’s just what it looks like: concrete, glass, metal. Nothing else.”
Mal nodded slowly.
“You knew that,” Silven pressed, “as well as I did. Why are you here now?” Mal didn’t look up at him, just leaned back in the sofa and closed his eyes. Silven’s own eyes, unadorned by cellenses—though the metallic button of a cellpatch protruded near his ear—searched Mal’s figure with sharp, mathematical precision. It was a meticulous precision, Rose realized, that did not exactly fit the surface polish.
“Mal?” he said.
“He’s had it kind of hard lately, Mr. Silven.” Rose’s voice sounded like a thunder crack in her own ears.
Silven looked up at her as if stumbling on an entirely new piece of the equation all at once.
“My name isn’t Silven, Rose,” he said to her. “It’s Remak. Jon Remak. And I’d very much like to help you.”
Ari
EARLY IN HER SENIOR YEAR of high school, Laura’s boyfriend had been Ari. Never had there been such an absolute, total, professional douche as Ari. Big and sleek, with the hard, streamlined physique of a track and field athlete, Ari had bright blond hair with a steel earring riveted in his ear, a quiet smile, and a low voice that never lost control. He appeared an extremely confident, tightly controlled guy. Having lost her virginity only at the end of eleventh grade, Laura was still in the throes of discovering what made sex good and what could make it better. She liked the idea of Ari’s apparent discipline and control, and, some two months into their relationship, she found herself comfortable enough to take things to that level. Ari had a quiet enthusiasm for it and energy that he had earned by cutting all those math classes to put extra time in on the track. Best of all, as a result of that tightly bound self-control, he seemed only too happy to let Laura take the lead. Until . . .
Until the day he brought her home while his parents were gone for the weekend and they found their way into his mom and dad’s huge king-size bed, and as she lay there, naked, he mysteriously excused himself for a minute and returned with his track-mate, Mike—no, not Mike, Mark. Where had Mike come from? Mark was slim as a razor, with a nervous twitch on his lips and a hazy look in his eyes. He had a jumpy energy and his speech was slightly slurred, and while he undressed, Ari came over to a stunned Laura, kissed her gently on the check, and spoke in that quiet, always controlled voice.
“Enjoy it,” he said. “I’m just going to watch.”
Naked, Laura came out from under the covers, slapped Ari across the face so hard that the echo of it rang off the bed frame and the lamps, and she blew right past the confused and slow-moving Mark. Never had Laura felt unsafe in an intimate physical situation, never before felt invaded; a very unfortunate introduction of darkness into something so playful and joyful. Her fascination in and pursuit of psychological theory had already begun, and she had an inkling of what was healthy and what was not, and that it was, to a great extent, in how things were done as much as in exactly what things were done. Ari had fucked that one up to high heaven, fucked it up unforgivably, turned himself from a strong, quiet mystery into a leering pervert in the space of less than a minute.
One might’ve thought that the slap and exit would have ended the story, but the following Monday, in school, after a weekend of sobbing silently into her pillow and trying to decide whether she could ever tell her mother and father about this, Ari came up to her, looking concerned.
“You seemed really upset,” he said at the lockers, the rest of the student body streaming down the hallways on the way to their first class. “Is everything okay?”
She took him out back, to the slim, shady strip of grass between the PE equipment storage and the maintenance shack, and laid into him. He stared down at her, dark in his eyes, but no expression on his features until, when she felt she was about halfway through, he simply turned around and walked away; he never spoke to her again.
That had been it through the end of high school. She had searched for memories during the second half of that year: seeing him at graduation, giving him a final glance of electric hatred. But she knew not to go searching through those memories too closely now. She was fighting hard to avoid a resurgence of those problems that had plagued her first few months at Vassar, problems that were just now coming to a head. With Josh. Her latest breakup.
She sat at their favorite bench on the round, her black hair tied in a tight ponytail, sticking out from under her father’s Mets cap; a little moral support for a girl diving into weird, unknown waters by sheer instinct. She was careful not to wear anything Josh particularly liked—no tight, white tank top, no capri jeans with the psychedelic flowers up the side—just a blue T-shirt and jeans. She wasn’t his great love; she was just some girl about to break up with him, that he’d moon over for a bit, then remember fondly, and eventually let go of. But she was sitting on their favorite bench, just the same, to acknowledge that they had something good for a while.
He jogged up breathless, fifteen minutes late. She had spent the time, unaware of it, searching through her own spinning head.
“It was Professor Garner.” He had his famous lopsided “I’m a dope” grin when he sat down and explained, giving her a swift kiss on the cheek. “He held me after class for a couple of minutes.”
