“Sleeping. Always sleeping.”
I heaved a sigh of relief, then asked, “Where’s the X now?”
“Grapevine?” she asked. “El Tejón,” she said with more confidence. “Where is that?”
“Good job,” I encouraged her.
“What about the other channels?” Lupe queried.
“Other channels?”
“Two hundred channels. Coming to the dish invisibly from the sky. I have been thinking about this. The sky is wide and endless.”
“Yes, yes. Keep watching.”
“But,” she insisted, “I’ve been looking. There are more maps than just one. More than just one X. Maybe another nine or ten. What does this mean?”
I groaned. More maps? Lupe was looping through channel after channel. She had trouble with the coordinates. She could be describing any of a hundred urban centers. I had to see it myself. International crime cartels with access to satellite tracking devices. Tracking illegal merchandise in dozens of cities. How do crime cartels get their own satellites? If a dish on the Tropic of Cancer could pick it up like Direct TV or GPS, why not any other? Lupe was right; the sky was wide and endless.
But where were the villains and what were they up to? Selling body parts from third world children for transplants? Smuggling drugs in oranges? Conceivably, there was a villain at the beginning and end of every signal. Multiple uplinks and downlinks to a constellation of satellites. But who was tracking all this? The commerce was on the ground; the threads pulling them around were in the air. Which conspiracy theory was this one? The cartel, if that was what it was, was a big invisible net. If I had a strategy, it would be to get in there and snarl the net without entangling myself.
As for entanglements, I was getting used to carrying on my relationship with Emi over the net. Maybe she was right. It was a lifestyle I had to accept. If things continued the way they were going, what with the jetsetting and newstime on a kind of dedicated speed, I was never going to be home. I was never going to be in one place for very long. My life had become frantic but constantly satisfying. Maybe that was because I had no time to think about it, but considering my mistake with Rafaela, it was probably just as well. Maybe I had finally lost my romantic notions; I’d become truly noir, a neuromancer in dark space.
Talking to Emi over the net was oddly satisfying. There was no voice inflection to imply anything, yet everything could be inferred from everything. Maybe some irony was indicated by ;-), but when talking to Emi, ironic notation was redundant. And it was quite a bit more private, if you considered the ears hanging on your phone conversations. It was a new dimension in communicating. Let your fingers do the talking. Digital connections. Digital manipulations. And she was right. It was incredible how sexy text could be. Well, I had always been a text man. As Emi liked to complain, I got my cheap thrills from black and white. But I could also deliver. Emi was always moaning it over the net; my descriptive powers really made her ache. And then there was the rest of the net; it was a big borderless soup and I was cooking. There were miles and miles of text stacking up at my address; I couldn’t be alone ever again. Maybe the net was the ultimate noir.
I found a hookup for my notebook computer and zipped out a few lines to her mailbox: Angel, you’re gonna be proud of me. I’m finally getting the hang of hypertext.
Bunches of her old messages popped up. I hadn’t had the time to read them. I took a moment to scan a few: So, Gabe, you’ve finally decided to write your own book. You certainly have read (or seen) enough of them. Is it going to be an L.A. Chicano private dick thing? Of course, I’m in it. I mean, I’m the private dick’s thing, am I not? (kiss) If she only knew.
I typed in my budgets, storylines that spun a net of loose threads: coked oranges traced to Brazil/Amazon via a Colombia shipment through Honduras, and since poison can be carried by the seemingly innocuous fruit fly, consequences could prove grave; international infant organs conspiracy—tip of the iceberg; voices in the valley of the homeless raised in choral symphony: What’s LAPD gonna do? Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!
Maybe it was a net of loose threads, but I was onto it. For every budget, I set up a newsgroup over the net. For example: alt.soc.med.transplants .farming.infants was one; another hot topic was alt.soc.drugs.oranges (oranges continued to be scarce, worth their weight in gold, and floated invisibly through some parallel world). Almost instantaneously these groups were cluttered with commentary, hearsay, and even legitimate info. I waded through everything, ferreting out the good stuff and double-checking the sources. It was amazing what people out there knew or thought they knew and what they’d offer up for public scrutiny. On the spiked orange issue, I got a tip on an actual location for a lab somewhere outside Manaus, Brazil, doing the chemistry mix with medicinal rare plants and venoms provided by local aborigines. A coroner’s list of the dead turned up. Another source even broke down the components; scary thing was it was not only scholarly, it looked like a damned recipe. Someone commented that if this was what it took to save the rain forest, so be it.
My infant organ farming newsgroup quickly self-divided into subtopics: Procedures. Ethics. Updates. Out of the blue, a chat group of people claiming to have received illegally farmed organs got scheduled. The chat here seemed driven by a combination of guilt-ridden angst and vicious survival types. The chat typically went like this:
—If I thought for one moment that I was a recipient of an illegal organ, I would rip my heart out right now.
—So I say all transplanted organs are illegal. Rip it out now!
—We are all living on borrowed time. God bless the man on death row who willed me his kidney.
—This chat is about “farmed” organs, not “willed” organs.
—Death row’s not close enough?
—I was a baby when this occurred. My folks were trying to save my life. How do I go on living, knowing what I know?
This was all very well, but as a reporter I needed some facts. What do you know? I queried back. Do you know the source of your organ? Who was the doctor who performed the transplant?
Much of it was vague or not forthcoming. I waded through massive amounts of drivel to no avail, but I wasn’t giving up. I was going to close in on the culprits. I wanted my link to the creeps who battered Rafaela. As soon as I had the goods on them, the entire story would be on every major mailing list on the net and e-mailed and faxed to the desk of every politician, every publication, and every public and private organization with an axe to grind.
Emi’s old e-mail slipped back in. She never left me alone, even in the past tense. I been thinking, Gabe. This L.A. net of crime theme you want to pursue: Isn’t it a little dated? Gambling and racketeering condoned by the police: really now. Even the CIA/Contra arms-for-crack scheme is passé. I mean, have you seen some of the new chat menus online? For example, I accidentally discovered this newsgroup which is basically about human organ farming. El bizarro! It’s crude I know, but check out the subtopic on “sales.” It’s buying and selling time. Baby hearts are going for a mere $30 thou. Sounds like a down payment on a Mercedes.
Damn. I couldn’t sleep on this. Look away, and I’d lose my lead. I rushed back into my newsgroup, but not before scanning a few more of Emi’s Es. Of course I’m assuming you’re going to turn this newsprint of yours into a screenplay. If I were to direct it (smile), I’d be faithful to the black-and-white vision of course. Do something visually exciting: sunlight so blazing hot, it’s casting those dark & dirty shadows. Remember, sweetheart, if L.A. hates it, N.Y.’s gonna love it! Emi was rambling again. By the way, I’m thinking of getting you a dog for company. Not a real dog. A fuzzy software dog. It’s so cute! It lives in your computer in the corner of your monitor. Of course you have to feed it and clean up after it just like any other dog . . . There was stuff here for days. It could wait.
I started to check out for the moment, but typed in: I’m gonna be tied up, stuck to the desk here for the next few days. No time to chat. Keep me posted. Luvya A
ngel.
I looked at the time, a digital reminder in the corner of my notebook. It was no longer daylight, but it didn’t matter. I heightened the contrast on the screen, the harsh LCD light exposing a web of evil. In previous days, I would have even gone for a cold cup of pewter-colored coffee, but news itself had become my constant high. With the chaos of events, anything I put into the system got snorted up. Editors were going through the stuff with sieves, and what was sifted out went like toner, directly to print or the net. As soon as you had a lead, you had a deadline. It was now or never. I was tapping the very veins of news and shooting the stuff back into the system. I felt strangely powerful. Buzz and I were gonna share that Pulitzer yet.
I no longer looked for a resolution to the loose threads hanging off my storylines. If I had begun to understand anything, I now knew they were simply the warp and woof of a fraying net of conspiracies in an expanding universe where the holes only seemed to get larger and larger. It was like Emi with her multiple monitors, channel surfing, or reading a slew of books simultaneously. The picture got larger and larger. I could follow a story or I could abandon it, but I could not stop.
CHAPTER 44:
Commercial BreakThe Big Sleep
“Pull that goddamn dick down outta the air!” Buzzworm yelled at the NewsNow engineer, shoving him into the van with Emi slumped in the front seat. Kerry lowered the telescoping antenna, and Buzzworm gunned the van into action, jammed it between the spreading lanes. He could see the chasing helicopters in the rearview mirror approaching in a cloud of rainbow smoke. It could have been an air show, even with the strafing machine guns and multiple explosions. Emi, bleeding through her New Age tan and towel, appreciated the precision timing as if it were special FX.
“Can’t you drive any faster?” she taunted as if this E-ticket wasn’t E-nough.
Buzzworm wove the van through the droves of screaming and panic-stricken people like so many walk-ons, avoiding the sudden car explosions and shattering glass, careening around the digitally constructed dismembering of cats and dogs and even a horse. A cast of thousands—military and civilian—ran this way and that in an epic disaster. Emi looked on with dull approval; it was B fare. The explosions could be extended, the ride sped up, the sensation of violence and speed intensified. Strange, but she could actually smell the gasoline and smoke. Her eyes teared uncontrollably.
The van’s rear tire blew, and Buzzworm forced the thumping vehicle up the side of the freeway valley, heading instinctively for some palm trees swaying against the wind of helicopter wings in a camouflage of smog. Stray bullets hailed from above as he crouched through the ivy, cradling Emi, and slipped with her between that tight constellation of palms. It was strangely and suddenly peaceful there.
Emi pulled a bloody hand up to her face and stared. “I give you permission not to touch my blood,” she said. “I tested negative, but you never know.”
Buzzworm held her close. He knew a dead cooky when he saw one.
In the corner of Buzzworm’s eye, she could see the monitors in the van flickering beyond the palms. There she was, the NewsNow producer sunning on the NewsNow van. There was the shot and Buzzworm heroically scrambling up to pull her off the roof. The camera swung wildly looking for the direction of the shot. Easy does it. But what the camera caught was how the first shot was the push-button that set off all the others. It panned the barrage with a horrible urgency that made the viewer remember momentarily that a human eye directed its vision. Captioning ran across the bottom of the monitor: Breaking News! LIVE footage from the downtown freeway interchange . . .
Buzzworm wondered what could be live in this sense. Emi, on the other hand, lived for this. And it would repeat itself again and again to remind the world what the beginning of the end looked like. In this sense, she would never die.
Even so, Emi’s mind wandered from current events. “I had a dream that I got buried in the La Brea Tar Pits, and years later I became the La Brea Woman. You know, my bones and a holographic image of me.”
Buzzworm smiled his smile.
Emi winced, “Here I am in the healing capitol of the nation. You’d think some spiritual force would make its appearance at a time like this. Where are all the Jesuses and Mohammeds when you need them?”
“Making a living, I suppose.” Buzzworm shook his head.
“Wonder where my private dick is?” Emi murmured.
“I know Balboa’d be here if he could.” Buzzworm was unconvincing in the sympathetic mode.
“Are you going to sweet-talk me now that I’m dying?”
“Was hoping you’d leave a year’s supply of batteries for me in your will.”
“Only if you promise me the complete package: Forest Lawn, naked Davids, daily rosebuds, and eternal music. What’s that you’re listening to?” She nodded at his earplug.
“’S not eternal.” He shook his head.
Emi smiled. “Who’d a thought you and I’d get this close?” She might have embraced him, but her limbs had ceased to feel. About all she could do was to look deeply into his eyes and flutter her lashes. “If we can jus’ get along, maybe all our problems will go away.”
“Gonna take more than holdin’ hands to start that revolution.”
“Oh well,” Emi blew it off. “For Gabe. Did you try the net?”
“Baby sister, you know I don’t know nothing about that.”
“Gabe’s into the net. Ever since he saved that village, he’s been devoted to online.”
Buzzworm looked around, wondering if the net could save anyone from the current situation. In the smoke, he could see the military, in jungle camouflage, making its move down the freeway canyon. The live monitor didn’t show this. It was too busy repeating the beginning of the end, ad nauseam. Being the hero of this footage, he looked to her as the heroine. Finally, her death would be unforgivable. Emi’s enraged media would see to that. A thousand homeless could die, but no one would forget her ultimate sacrifice.
She continued, “Last I looked, Hollywood wants to buy the rights to the guerrilla war in Chiapas.”
“Why even go that far?”
“Tell Gabe, I got lucky and went to The Big Sleep.” She pouted for effect. “Did you see it?”
“What?”
“The Big Sleep. There’s a chauffeur who dies, see. His car gets pushed off the Santa Monica pier. Suddenly they stop the action. Someone asks the question: Who killed him? Script continuity, see. Nobody knows. They call up Raymond Chandler. He doesn’t know either. Gabe told me this, so it’s all hearsay anyway, but it’s like that.”
“Like what?”
“The Big Sleep. Just cuz you get to the end doesn’t mean you know what happened.”
“Oh.” Buzzworm wasn’t going to push it.
Didn’t matter. She just rambled on anyway. “Hey, I read there’s some guy digitizing L.A. Gonna put this treacherous desert outpost online. Maybe the big sleep is a big digital wet dream. And life is just a commercial break. Maybe Gabe can call me up in cyber, and we can do it in my sleep.” She grinned and gasped, “Interactive-like.”
“I’m not gonna remember to tell Balboa something I don’t even understand. Can’t you keep your message simple?”
“How about this? I just want to know one thing: What color is blood in . . . black and . . . white?” It dribbled down in a thick vein over her lips.
Buzzworm noted it would most likely be black, but he said, “It’s all shades of gray, baby sister. Shades of gray.”
Emi’s voice sank to a whisper. “Abort. Retry. Ignore. Fail . . .”
CHAPTER 45:
MidnightThe Line
Rafaela opened her eyes. “What time is it?” she whispered.
“What does it matter, my child?” Doña Maria rose from her seat of vigilance.
“The match. It will be starting soon.” Rafaela grabbed the swaddled pocketknife from under her pillow, pushed aside the sheets, and slipped from the bed.
“You aren’t well enough. You’ve been sleep
ing so fitfully. Where are you going?”
Rafaela stepped across the room, grabbed a small hand mirror from atop a chest of drawers, and stared at herself in horror, but the old woman snatched the thing away with a sudden fierceness. “Whatever are you doing?”
Rafaela bit her lip, adjusted the white lace straps of her cotton shift over her bruised shoulders and limped barefoot into the garden toward the orange tree. Doña Maria had applied a slather of poultices over her wounds; now dried, her skin had a chalky appearance. New red blood and old black blood spotted the white trim of her sheer gown. “You’re still bleeding, my dear,” Doña Maria called after.
Indeed it was a long walk, the well-worn path the same path but a path disappearing forever northward through a thicket of sunflowers and cactus, and the orange tree a small green speck in the distance. Doña Maria’s protesting voice was soon swallowed by folding space as was a blinking X on a map on a television screen. Rafaela kept sight of the tree and stepped lightly through the sand and dust. She only stopped momentarily to fold the pocket-knife into the skirts of her gown, tying it in a secure knot in the bloodied trim. After several hours, she strained through the good vision in one eye to see the thin figure of a man leaning against the tree. “Bobby?” She hurried forward, pressing her hand to her side, cracked ribs shifting under her skin.
Bobby seemed to have seen her and was now walking toward her. They both walked and ran forever. The purple places on her face and limbs throbbed with every step. She stretched her arms across an infinite and yet invisible chasm.
But then she saw it: the fine silken thread she knew so well, the one that would lead to the orange and hopefully to Sol. It lay in the dust, occasionally whipping about like a delicate piece of tinsel. One more step and she could grab it. Take it in her hands and twist it about her body, pull herself toward Bobby. She held herself against it and, like a sweeping wave, rode forward.
Bobby held her bruised face in his hands and wept like a child. He stroked her dark hair and tenderly felt the crusting patches in her scalp where the hair had been ripped away. He lifted her lace shift away and kissed the welts on her bare shoulders and the scars along her back. He cradled her in his arms, heaving and groaning. He wrapped himself about her wanting to protect all the parts of her yet untouched, wanting to heal all the parts of her so tortured.
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