by Tim Scott
“I don’t need to read any poetry right now,” I said, briefly looking at the words and then back at the man. He wasn’t tall, but he was powerfully built if overweight, and his suit didn’t quite fit his frame and slightly lagged behind his movements.
“Just read the poetry, and I’ll be with you as soon as I can,” he said, “and if you finish up with that, then stare at the picture of the puppy. I’m sure that will chase away any unease.” He kept writing and shuffling papers.
“Are you going to slice away my memory?”
“When you finish with the poetry, look at the picture of the puppy and pretend you are stroking it. His name is Charles III. I’m nearly done here,” he said in a distracted monotone.
Finally he looked up and widened his mouth in what I guessed he passed off as a smile.
“So, Lindbergh, H. How did you like the puppy?”
“Are you going to wipe my memory?” I said.
“Not just at the moment. Did you look at the puppy? The secret is to pretend it’s on your lap and you’re stroking it. ‘Nice puppy, nice puppy.’ Like that. Within a few weeks, we will have pictures of puppies and kittens on the walls all the way down the PRR system, and the smell of fresh grass clippings pumped through as well. I’d also like to promote the sack as a protective womb. Did you think of it as a womb on your journey?”
“Can’t say I did. Are you from marketing?”
“Yes.” He wrote some notes and I wondered what this man thought life was really about. I wondered if he’d ever taken a moment to stand back and ask himself what the hell he was doing. “If one of the officers had called it a womb, or it had the word womb on it in big letters, do you think that would have helped trigger that as a concept?” Since he was strangely economical with how far he was prepared to open his mouth, his words had a clipped edge to them.
“No,” I said. “It’s a sack.”
“I know it’s a sack, but you have to use your imagination. You have to give something to get something back. The same with the picture of the puppy.” He put his pen down, got up slowly and precisely, and came around to sit on the front of his desk, his suit fumbling into some outlandish creases as it fought to keep up with all this movement. There was a pause as he folded his arms.
“This is cutting-edge stuff we’re doing here. One day, prisoners will be long-term head hacked automatically at the start of their journey along the track, and then images from their mind can be shown to them on big screens as they travel along, accompanied by stirring music. A bit like their life flashing before their eyes so that when they reach here to be interviewed, they’ll tell us everything.”
“I can’t wait,” I said.
“Yes.” He stared at me, but the smile froze as the door sprang open.
“Just stretching my legs,” said a fridge.
“You? Get back to the kitchen,” said the marketing man.
“Okay. Sorry, I know I said I wouldn’t come in again, but do you want some anchovies while I’m here? Or some cake?” It opened its door and the light came on with a flourish.
“No, get out,” cried the marketing man as his suit creased up like a piece of unfolding origami. “What is it with that fridge?” he said, closing the office door behind it. “It’s always coming in. We marketed them too well, that’s what it is, and now they think the world owes them something.”
“Maybe it does.”
“What? Do you know some of them think they should have pension plans? The only people making money out of it are the lawyers.” His breathing was becoming asthmatic, and he took out an inhaler. “The food bill at our main office over the summer was astronomical, because the fridge was secretly ordering deliveries of hummus. Every time you wanted milk, you’d find the thing was stuffed full of hummus. I mean, what is hummus, anyway? We had it taken away in the end, and got a regular nonspeaking fridge. That was a big relief. Now I don’t get snide comments if I eat dairy products.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Yes?”
A woman in a matching pencil skirt and top opened the door. “It’s Louise, Mr. Malbranque. Can I have a word? It’s about the red-smoke meeting.”
“Sure. What is it?”
“Confidential,” said the woman, mouthing the word, but with hardly any sound behind it.
“Of course. Please look at the picture of the puppy,” he instructed me. “I won’t be a moment and then we’ll carry on.” He got up and walked from the office.
He left the door ajar, and I could hear him talking to the woman in a low voice outside in the corridor.
chapter
FORTY-TWO
How are you getting on with the puppy? Mr. Lindbergh?” The man’s voice trailed off as he returned to the room and saw the empty sack hanging from the hook. He took another pace in.
I was wedged in above the door and looked down, imploring him to close it, but he hesitated, and I could hold myself in this position only for so long, so I jumped. For a moment, I felt his bulky frame resist my weight, but then he collapsed onto his stomach with a strangled cry. I grabbed a picture from his desk and cracked him over the head, and he stopped moving.
I got up and shut the door.
I knelt down and searched through his pockets, taking his wallet and red gun. Then I sat down in his chair and worked at the cuff that was still on my right hand with the end of a coat hanger, and after a minute got it to release.
I stood up, pulled his hands behind his back, and got the cuffs on him. Then I dragged him into the sack, wound him in the yards of chain, and hung him on the hook.
On the desk was a panel of buttons. I ran my hand over them like a kid selecting a chocolate, trying to read the tiny writing above each. Finally I found one that looked like it said “Prisoner Removal” and I pressed it.
“Thank you for pressing this button,” said the console. I waited; nothing happened. I pressed it again. “Thank you once again for pressing this button,” said the voice. “It really is appreciated. Nice one!”
Still nothing happened.
I tried the one next to it.
“Thanks for pressing this button, too. Fabulous!”
I tried another and some classical music boomed out. I frantically pressed all the other buttons, and finally I heard the whir of machinery as the chain took in the slack links and began to lift him from the room. Then it accelerated and he was yanked through a hole in the ceiling. “Stop this! Hey!” he cried groggily as he disappeared in perfect time to Thus Spake Zarathustra, and then the trapdoor in the ceiling flapped shut. “I’m in marketing. Get me out of this! Hey!”
His voice faded and then there was silence.
chapter
FORTY-THREE
My hand was bruised and grazed where I had scraped it through the handcuff, but it didn’t feel broken. I cut off the red collar, buttoned my jacket to cover the red printing, and slipped out of the office into the corridor, carrying a red pen and a file that had been lying around. And for a moment, I felt again that mix of tired optimism that I had carried with me over the years when I had been a cop, and I had tried hard to hold onto a belief that I was making a difference.
No one hassled me; I guess I knew how to look the part, and most people were too self-absorbed anyway. I passed a whole line of framed certificates hanging on a wall.
“Runner-up in the category Best Small-Arms Fire at a Female Suspect,” said one. “Most Imaginative Use of a Riot Shield During a Riot—Interstate Police Awards, Second Place,” said another, but I didn’t catch the rest.
From an office on my left, I heard a cop singing: “This cookie is my friend! The diet is my enemy.” As I passed I saw him start to drink his coffee.
I walked on, trying to recall where the stairwell should be, and came across a long line of prisoners hanging in sacks on a piece of stationary track. A cop was sitting nearby reading a newspaper. “Was it you I told about the time I sang at the New York Opera?” said one of the other prisoners. His wispy gray hair
slanted across his face in a wave.
“Yeah, that was me. You told me,” said the cop, without looking up. “But that isn’t going to win you any favors. Opera doesn’t cut any ice with the New Seattle Police Department. Now, Parma ham, I like that. You get me some Parma ham, then maybe I can help you out a bit.” He switched pages.
I looked at the faces of the prisoners each in turn as I passed, and then a little way ahead I saw Nena and felt cold.
The prisoner who had been talking to the cop began singing softly. It was opera. The first note sounded flimsy and comic as it jarred against the heavy atmosphere as cops passed up and down the corridor.
Nena stared straight ahead. When I came level with her, she shook her head with the slightest of movement.
“Fridge,” she said almost inaudibly.
I stood looking into her brown eyes. For a moment I had the intense desire to reach up and sweep the hair away from her face.
“Fridge,” she said again, and I forced myself to walk on. The pure ringing tone of the opera grew louder, and I felt drawn into the rise and fall of the notes as it filled the corridor. Then I heard a crack and the singing stopped dead.
I looked back and saw the cop holding his truncheon, standing by the man who now hung in a limp pile in his sack.
“Parma ham, I told you,” said the cop. “You other guys heard me warn him, didn’t you?” He prodded the next guy hanging from the track.
“I heard you. I heard you,” said the guy.
“Yeah? Good. What about you others? Parma ham?”
“Yeah! Parma ham. Yeah. You said Parma ham.”
“Parma ham, right. Now I’m getting through to you guys at last,” he said, and went back to his paper.
The violence sent my heart pounding and I turned back. My thoughts raced at one and three-quarter pace. I was going to do my damnedest to protect this woman.
“Hey,” I said to the cop, “maybe I can help you out with some Parma ham.”
“Yeah?” He looked up. I took out the envelope the cops had given me in the Halcyon and quietly gave him all the money inside.
“Enough for Parma ham?” I said.
“Yeah, that’ll buy Parma ham. What kind of Parma ham were you after?”
“What kind?” I said, thinking the Parma ham metaphor had now definitely outrun its usefulness.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be honest with you. You see that woman there? She’s a neighbor and we’ve had an affair. They’ll be pictures in her mind that would make my wife apoplectic if she gets hold of them. You know how these things have a habit of coming out?”
“Ah, I get you.”
“So maybe she doesn’t have to be head hacked. What do you think? It’s just an idea. And maybe keep all this off her record.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Enjoy your Parma ham,” I said and walked away.
Cops were wandering about or slouching in offices with their stomachs peeking over the edges of the desks. At any kind of slouching competition, cops would be right up there.
I passed more offices with ill-fitting doors and a room labeled Authorized Personnel Only, on which someone had scrawled Unauthorized Personnel, Tuesdays Nine to Nine-thirty.
The noise of the track was louder now, and the thin partition walls vibrated.
I headed down a stairwell, feeling my heart thump in looping beats, and I took a long breath, smelling that same familiar, underlying odor of disinfectant.
On the wall at one of the landings was a bulletin board, overflowing with cards. I stopped as a group of cops came past. “For sale: riot shield. Shoulder charge model, shaped by Ralf Semmens. Some scratches. And one ding from a brick, but nice repair. Must be seen. $300,” said one.
I unpinned it.
It took me another five minutes to get to the exit.
“What kind of mood is that?” said of the security goons, as a piece of hip-hop at double speed filled the air. “It’s weird.”
“Yeah,” said the cop who was plugged into the reader. “I drank a lot of caffeine this morning. I’ll be running around all day and I won’t sleep tonight. It does that to me.”
I reached the checkpoint and the cop started to plug into my feed, but I thrust the card so close to his face that he had to jerk back.
“You know the guy selling this?” I said.
The cop took the card.
“No. Is he D section?”
“This is all I have.”
He shook his head. I nodded.
“Okay. Thanks anyway.” I took the card and walked swiftly out into the lobby.
People were milling about for reasons that escaped me. There were maybe fifty lines all labeled with boards saying things like Fines for Downtown or Fines for the Wharf.
In front of me, a drunkard wearing a cheap suit, which shone with plastic, was flattening out a filthy piece of paper he had just removed from his pocket. His limbs twitched awkwardly, as though his body were nothing more than a sack filled with otters. I stepped around him, inhaling a lungful of alcohol.
A couple of bums were waiting in line at a lane marked Tramps Who Just Want to Shout at the Police. They were dressed in layers of beleaguered clothing and carrying bulging bags.
I found myself trying to wedge my way past a man who had brought a metal filing cabinet with him on a cart and now was delving into various drawers.
The atmosphere trawled up a bad taste in the mouth as though this lobby was a magnet for madness, sucking in people who were slightly off balance. Maybe it could even send the blood the wrong way around the body. There was a palpable, down-at-the-heels heaviness here, as if the fear on the streets was being drawn in, and then getting absorbed into the fabric of the building itself.
Many of these people had seriously lost their way in life. They had unkempt hair and sad wandering eyes that were constantly searching for someone who would lead them to a better place. It had not been like that when I had worked here. There had not been this depth of hopelessness.
I barged my way toward the doors, but a furry, eight-foot squirrel confronted me.
Its whiskers trembled. Then it cocked its head.
“Rusty Ragtail the Safety Squirrel welcomes you to New Seattle, the city of safety,” said a stunningly beautiful woman wearing a spangly leotard, who seemed to be chaperoning the fluffy creature. “New Seattle Health and Safety is having a big drive on sharp-corner awareness this week, so we have an exhibition here.” She pointed to the other side of the lobby. “Please take a moment to browse. One of the sharp corners was brought in from Moscow. Rusty Ragtail likes that one, don’t you?”
The squirrel nodded.
“Isn’t he cute?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“He’s not scum is he?”
“Scum?” I said. “No.”
“The Chicago Safety Squirrel is scum, isn’t he?”
“Is he?”
“Yeah. How could they have sunk so low as to copy our idea of a safety squirrel?” The squirrel opened its mouth and put its hand in. “It makes him sick,” she said. “Come on, Rusty Ragtail.”
And they padded happily away.
I wove my way toward the exit and found myself near the exhibition. More women in spangly leotards were giving away brochures and, at the back, a close-harmony group began singing. “Stay safe! Watch out! Stay safe! Watch out! Stay safe! Watch out for that—”
They stopped singing and one of them let out a long piercing scream.
“New Seattle Health and Safety. Please, don’t die for no reason.”
Those words mocked me the more I heard them.
I tried to tell myself it was just a slogan as I accepted a brochure from a girl who was pressing it toward me with a smile that surgery had crafted into a permanent fixture across her face. But they resonated too deeply for me just to dismiss them.
And all this Health and Safety crap was mothballing everyone from reality, numbing their sense of what it was to be alive, stopping them
from facing up to their own flimsy existence on this planet.
Just as I had mothballed myself away from my own life.
And I knew that that led nowhere. I wondered if only those who have truly come to terms with their own mortality can feel compassion. Perhaps that’s how it worked. And it struck me that that was what Nena and Abigail had in common.
Compassion.
I battered my way through the crowd and outside to the steps. The remains of a smashed stone bird had been swept into a pile and I realized it was the one I had knocked off the roof the night before. The head looked like a raven.
I hurried down to the sidewalk where a man was busking with a massive gong. He had some music on a stand and struck the gong once theatrically as I approached. Someone near me gave him a few coins.
“Thanks,” he said, pointing to the sheet music. “You came in at the good bit. There were four hundred and eighty bars of rest before that.”
chapter
FORTY-FOUR
I headed along the sidewalk. “The end of the world is nigh!” said the man, perched on his battered box on the corner of the block. He now had a bandage wound around his head and I didn’t get too close in case he recognized me. “With some mildly nigh periods later. Then the end of the world will become really nigh tonight, especially in the Denny Park area, before easing off and not being nigh at all in the morning.”
I hailed a drongle. It was in a bad way, with a gash running clean through the roof, and dribbling blue fluid in a long line from one of the wheels.
I shouted Gabe’s address into the large horn on the side and climbed in, aware that two other people were already there. It was a young couple that had been out shopping. The girl was snuggled into the shoulder of the boy. They were smart and clean. And happy.
To them life was simple. And I hoped it would stay that way.
The drongle slithered around a corner barely under control, but at least the screens weren’t working.
“Nice shirt,” said the girl, and I realized my jacket was undone but the red printing had run into a blur. “But red? Won’t the cops be pissed if they see you with that? That’s restricted.”
