He stopped them again and stroked her arms. “Only, when I turn on you it’s to make sure others play nice around you, and not to play nasty with you.”
The realization seemed to work better on her than the banter, softening her defenses. Maybe he was a way to detox from all they’d done to her. If only she’d give him the chance. He hugged her tight and squeezed the last bit of resistance out of her. His arms felt comforting in their hardness. His steely body wore like a plush down mattress compared to the wall of anxiety she kept around her, never being able to relax. She’d wondered all this time why she hadn’t been more bent out of shape by everything that had happened to her since they got on to her breakthrough. Now she understood why. She lived in this state of high anxiety; it was her norm. Suspecting good situations to turn bad was her baseline. Maybe part of her unconscious programming was to turn a good situation into a bad one.
“You don’t think I brought this on myself, do you?” she asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.
“Maybe I took the research job because I knew I’d never be able to give them the formula. I’d have to do something with it that could redeem the world rather than escalate the endless warfare that so describes us now.”
“If that’s the case, then you used your sixth sense for when a good situation was about to turn bad that you honed living with your parents to your advantage, and the world’s. But you most certainly did not make a good thing bad because you couldn’t bare the goodness.”
“How do you know? My parents couldn’t help but sabotage their own relationship. Why should I be any different with you?”
“Because I know a thing or two about self-sabotage, okay? I followed you around for six months knowing I was falling in love with you and the smart thing was to pull out. And each day the love grew the old me died in favor of something new, something that needed to get born. That’s how people like us sow the seeds of our own destruction. We take that self-menacing energy and we do something good with it.”
“But how do you know that’s me and not just you? Maybe you learned to turn negatives into positives. It doesn’t mean I have.”
“Why else would you keep testing what it is we have? To make sure it’s not based on infatuation and physical attraction alone? To make sure we’re not fooling ourselves about who we are and what we want from each other?”
“Because I can’t stand things to go right.”
“No, because you’re guaranteeing up front that they will. No more mom and dad reenactments.”
She sobbed as she collapsed into his chest. She shuddered so violently he had to keep shifting his weight to keep them both from falling over. Could she feel any worse? Putting him through this when he deserved better?
He tilted her chin up to him and they kissed, and it felt great. It felt so great that she never wanted it to end. And in that moment she knew he was right; she could take the good parts of life into herself without rejecting them or spitting them out.
When they resumed their walk after a long bout, long enough for the crowd walking by, parting themselves like the red sea to get past, to finally cue them that they had become a public spectacle, she felt a lot lighter.
The lovers strolling by arm in arm seemed to be auditioning cruder versions of the two of them, pointing up how far they’d come in bonding with one another. By thinking as much, maybe it was no longer him that was trying too hard, but her. Just relax, Jane, and go with it. The breeze kept whipping her hair into her mouth, giving her more time to think and less time to talk, which was probably a good thing.
Mike squeezed her hand, perhaps figuring he’d show the amateur Romeos how it was done by subtly conveying his feeling rather than showcasing it. She liked that their strides fit together without too much forced accommodation.
“It’s an outdoor café,” he said pointing, “made to order if romance is really what’s on the menu. This way you can be impressed by how everything that glitters still can’t pull my focus from you.”
“And that includes the starlets, and their fancy jewelry and furs and legs that go on forever.” She noticed they were crowding the café as well as the avenue. Just when her and Mike’s feelings for one another were coming to the surface, the competition was heating up from far more experienced paramours. Was that her programming, expecting good things to turn to bad, that was responsible again? She’d choose to trust his intuitions about her over her own for now. Times Square was an obvious magnet for young lovers, after all, and she hadn’t chosen the place, he had.
“If you’d like me to show the bold and the beautiful some charity by throwing them the occasional glance, I can,” he said. “But only for you.”
He grabbed the waiter before he could turn his back on them, and the empty table, without being offered it, and ordered something rapid-fire in French.
“You trying to dial up the romance with the French?” she said, taking her seat.
“If it makes you feel any better, they only teach us that stuff to make us better killers. Though don’t ask me who in France is worth killing these days.”
She laughed despite herself. “That’s not very nice. I’m sure we can think of somebody if we put our minds to it.”
The couple the table over overheard them and flinched. Mike reached out his arm and said, “Oh no worries. I haven’t killed anyone in at least a day.” He checked his watch. “Admittedly, I am a bit overdue. Not to worry about that either; the universe always provides.”
“Stow it, sweetheart. This is New York, Psychos Are Us. You’ll have to do a lot better than threaten to kill somebody, isn’t that right?” she said at the couple in a vain attempt to relax them. The pair pressed their lips together and spread them wide in a vain attempt to pretend to respond favorably to the gesture, then lowered their eyes.
“So tell me some more about yourself,” Michael said. “Take away all the killing, and I’m a pretty dull guy. I don’t know why I feel apologetic for that, but it seems like someone’s owed an apology.”
“It’s okay. Take away my research, and I’m not sure what I’d amount to. Even with it factored in, I can hardly promise to be interesting to anyone who doesn’t find microscopic life absolutely scintillating.”
“You had to have a personality once upon a time. Maybe in infancy?”
“When I was in a sorority in college, a couple frat boys held my arms, while the rest of his friends played horse shoes with my tits. Plastic horse shoes, of course, probably in an effort to be gentlemanly. I suggested the game would work a lot better in reverse, and I’d go to sleep with the guy whose hardened pecker could hold the most horseshoes.”
“Did you?”
“No, I dipped the horse shoes in the doctored punch bowl before throwing them, so when they couldn’t hold the erections anymore, they were in for some massive pain. I can still hear them screaming.”
“Ouch.”
“Why is it little boys never grow up?” she said.
“You see what you turn us in to. Can you blame us?” He broke off a piece of French bread from the basket the waiter dropped on the table. “But you showed me this side of your personality already, with the chemistry teacher.”
“No, I didn’t. The chemistry teacher, that was me using science to help teach humanity. By the time the frat boys came on the scene, I was no longer pursuing research for that. I wanted to use science to create the first post-humans, or trans-humans, whatever you wanted to call them. The people who feel so connected with their fellow man that their identity lies in that trans-egoic state, not in themselves.”
“That’s a lot for me to live up to.”
“Yes it is,” she said, giving him a good hard look.
“I hope I can.”
“What was the first trans-human feeling you ever had?” she asked, breaking some French bread off for herself.
“When I was in the trenches I had a companion dog. He used to lick the blood off my face, whether it was mine, or someone else’s
that had splattered there. I started having erotic feelings for the dog.”
She laughed so hard, she spit the French bread out her mouth, spraying him with gooey crumbs.
“Don’t knock bestiality till you’ve tried it. God, I miss that dog and all the erotic dreams that went with her.”
The couple the table over decided they’d had enough and asked for the check. It was okay by her. She could tell Mike was used to leaving an even bigger blast radius about himself that just kept widening. So she doubted he felt the least bit shocked either.
“I suppose by the end of college you’d gotten all one-track with the research and boring,” he said.
She nodded when the French bread stuffing her mouth made doing much more counterintuitive. Finally she washed the bread down with the wine the waiter bought, which they hadn’t ordered and was clearly meant for another table. They figured he’d still put it on their bill, so, why not? And it looked like pretty good wine. “About all I remember from grad school,” she said, “besides the stiff necks bent over a microscope were the soft swirling ice creams in a cup I used to get every night on Bancroft Avenue, one block from the Cal Berkeley campus.”
“You went to Cal Berkeley, the most interesting college on the planet, starring as the most boring person on the planet?”
“It seemed the least I could do; someone had to maintain the balance or risk the Earth tilting off axis from too many airheads gathered in one place.”
“Surely there were some highlights besides the ice cream.”
“I did forty-some guys in fifty-some nights in an effort to work out the kinks in my neck and shoulders from bending over the microscope.”
“You lie.”
“Nope. I had this book on tantric sex and all these elastic poses that convinced me the genius part of my mind would work even better once the stylized coitus freed the kundalini to climb up from the base of my spine to my crown chakra.”
“Did it work?”
“You can still ask me that?”
He laughed. “Sorry I didn’t bring the Karma Sutra with me. I was feeling ‘all that’ before this colossal wave of inadequacy set in with your latest tale. Not to worry, the wine will see to that. It really doesn’t take that much to get me to feel full of myself.”
“And what about you? Where did you come up with this personality? I can’t believe it was on the battlefield.”
“Don’t be so sure. You see enough close friends die beside you, and you develop a sense of humor about life, or…” He trailed off, remembering, while pouring the wine. She had to upturn the bottle for him to keep him from pouring all over the table.
“So you had to be taken to your breaking point before you could become the least bit human. How typically male.”
“I’d like to think I started at home, actually. My parents were also alcoholics. They persecuted one another with guilt as a way of reining one another in. Never mind they couldn’t control themselves, they excelled at controlling others. Of course to do that, they had to excel at personality destruction. No one ever gave constructive feedback in that family. They bombed you back into infancy with their character assassinations until the trauma meant any alleged personality was just a scab on a wound that could never entirely heal.” It took him a while to come back into the moment again. “So no surprise I became the funny one to cut the tension in the air. The more I made light of everything, the more I showed them they couldn’t get to me, and the more I stuck it to them.”
“So it’s a form of antisocial personality. Interesting. God, I should have gone into psych. Way more interesting than what’s under a microscope.”
“In anybody else’s hands, maybe.”
Mike looked up at the helicopter sounds, saw a guy hanging out the side with an automatic rifle. A half second later he was dancing in his chair under the combined impact of hundreds of bullets hitting him at once from the same weapon. That cleared out the rest of the outdoor café pretty fast, and most of the customers inside as well who hadn’t chosen to duck and cover instead. Strangely, the running and screaming all around helped calm him. He wiped his mouth with the napkin. “Don’t let them screw with the ambiance.”
“Wouldn’t think of it. More wine?”
“Please. Considering it’s red, we’ll just pretend I got sloppy with the bottle again.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
The helicopter landed and the goliath inside dropped his automatic rifle and picked up a grenade launcher and fired it. He blew up the café behind them and sent the two of them flying into the street. Mike peeled himself off the asphalt about the same time she did. “Honey, I don’t think they’re going to give us our moment.”
“Tell you what, go play. We’ll work on humanizing you later.”
“You sure, because I hate to have them pull me back down after I’ve come so far.”
“I’m all about being post-human these days, remember? Why don’t you go show him what that’s about?” She brushed the shards of broken glass off him. “Just try to have some fun; don’t let the anger take you over.”
“Will do.”
Despite the glib repartee, she registered the concern on his face, and her own, reflected back to her in his eyes. Neither of them had any idea how he’d survived what he had already, or how long it would last. Everything, including nanites, had its limits.
He peeled himself the rest of the way off the asphalt. Then, in his first act of disturbing the peace, he uprooted a streetlight and hurled it javelin style at the helicopter, skewering the gas tank and igniting the helicopter from the spark of the still flickering phosphorescent light. The blast knocked Shooter on the ground.
Mike picked up Goliath’s RPG launcher as it rolled towards him, and used it as a bat to send him and the rest of the soldiers climbing out of the helicopter, six in all, flying into the adjacent buildings.
They made him dance again by encircling him and letting him have it with automatic fire from all directions. He had to admit, he undulated in midair pretty well. As soon as their clips were empty, they fell back and let another circle of soldiers take point along the innermost ring of the circle.
Where had the latest soldiers come from? The curious thing was they looked like they worked for different firms; there were far too many private-army insignias flying on chests and shoulders. These were the corporate types just trying to keep him off the market until their more superior product came along, or perhaps their more inferior product, which no one could say was inferior if he had been taken off the market.
He drove his hands into the asphalt and picked it up, peeling it back and upturning the soldiers. He then wrapped them up snugly under the “blanket” by pressing the asphalt down on them, making sure to tuck them in as tightly as he could.
The nano converted the lead in his system for the heat and fuel they needed to drive their accelerated reactions. He could remember feeling worse the last time he had a headache. Though his reaction time had slowed as well as his gait, and his movements weren’t quite as smooth as he’d like. All impediments seemed to be working themselves out in rapid order however. Just not fast enough to stay alive out here in the open. Not under an ever increasing number of adversaries.
When his vision had cleared enough to take in the big picture, he noticed the latest arrivals to the party had blocked off the streets with armored vehicles, from which more private army soldiers were pouring.
He grabbed Jane’s arm, helped her off the ground, where she’d astutely remained to avoid errant bullets. “Come on, I have an idea.”
***
“God, what I’d give to be that guy.”
“Yeah, right, Punk Face. Between all the piercings, I don’t think they could possibly put any more holes in you with their automatic weapons fire.” The old man, not the least put off by the teen boy’s tattoos, or his piercings, returned his eyes to the window, and the guy tearing up the asphalt with his bare hands.
“What do you think makes him so strong
?” Geezer said. “Hopped up on PCP, you think?”
“That’s a Nano Man, dude. Infused with nanites. Next generation on line. One of the transhumans,” Punk Face said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Hydraulics for muscles’d be my guess,” said Pink Panties, Punk Face’s girlfriend. She’d jumped up on a chair by the window to see over her boyfriend’s and Geezer’s head. The pink panties staring the codger in the face was threatening to upstage Nano Man.”
“You think they’ll have these improvements ready in time for us old folks?” Geezer asked.
Pink Panties popped her pink bubblegum. “Yeah, right,” she said laughing. “The soldiers get this stuff first. Then maybe about ten years later it filters into the public domain. Can you hold out another ten years, old man?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have torn up my Army recruitment notice,” Punk Face said.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have used mine to roll a joint,” Pink Panties said, coughing after her latest exhale of pot smoke.
“I don’t know. Nano Man doesn’t seem like the one who’s a soldier. It’s the soldiers trying to kill him.” Geezer switched out his glasses for another pair in his pocket with even thicker lenses.
“Probably just war games,” Punk Face said, absently picking his nose and eating his buggers, as if trying to race some high octane thinking fuel to his brain.
“They’re tearing up Times Square for war games? Right,” Geezer snorted. He blew his nose in Pink Panty’s short skirt since it was the closest thing to his nose. “Sorry,” he said. “Damn double pneumonia for three years running. Can’t imagine you care with all the crap you have on your bodies now.” She was nearly as painted as Punk Face was, with a few less earrings. Most of hers were in the outer layer of her eyelids and lips.
She didn’t fully process what he was saying, still too captivated by Nano Man. “So tell me more about these Nano Men or trans-humans,” Geezer said.
She shook her head. “It’s anybody’s guess what these guys can do.”
Nano Man Page 14
