The screen read SUBMIT INQUIRY again.
“Look, Zee, we’re back where we started.”
Zetts shook his head, smug. No we weren’t.
The background window was different now. Active. Zetts typed in MADDOX, CONRAD L. and a whole lot of data began to reveal itself.
“There you are,” he said, grinning like a coyote.
This part is going to hurt.
Come along with me, as I review the highlights of my existence. You might stop to consider now and then what your own chart of ups and downs might look like; whether you fared better, or worse, or are continuing to lie to yourself.
I hunched my wheelless chair into Zetts’s pilot position, and began to scroll as indicated.
1966: I come squalling into the world on August 28, a breach birth, the sole genetic issue of Maddox, Carleton Coletrane (1932– 1988), and the former Joan Maurine McDermott (1939– 1972). My dad’s occupation is listed as SALESPERSON with a number of sub-headings under
Despite the fact that it was the sixties, my mom is summarily dismissed with the one-liner descriptive house wife. From my recollect, she loved me; I was planned. By the time I was four, my father had essayed a number of stopgap jobs to keep his compact family unit afloat—mail carrier, car salesman, assistant manager at a department store. I think he even tried the door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales racket in the last heartbeats of time before that idiom was outmoded. Later he scored a secure position in a large Ford dealership and kept that job for nearly a decade, which is, I guess, why he was forever pegged as salesperson.
1971 (July): While horsing around in the yard, I accidentally clock a neighborhood crony named Buster in the head with a rake. Buster nearly dies. Blood—I had never seen so much. It freaked me out so badly that as I ran home, to find adults or someone who could help, I stepped into a chuckhole and broke my left ankle. I’m still in a cast when my fifth birthday rolls around.
See: STRESS TOLERANCE, VIOLENT BEHAVIOR.
That was the only time I’d ever broken a bone in my life, and somebody thought it was important enough to record.
1972/April 1: Mother dies.
SEE: CONDITIONING BEHAVIORS, AUTHORITY FIGURES.
My mother died at age thirty-three of leukemia. It was the first time I ever saw my father cry. When I turned thirty-three, I realized I had about as much clue or preparation as they did, which is to say, no useful training. I forgave my parents a lot after they were both dead, and I was older than they were.
1973/June 9: Father remarries Nathalie Mae Wicks—wicked stepmom—and I gain a teenaged stepbrother named Clay. I’m six and just beginning my first summer vacation, from first grade.
1976: Fifth grade. I square-dance with a girl for the first time, Suzie Tyler Morrison.
It went on like that in numbing detail, including most of the bruises and scrapes, cross-indexed to arcane referents like RESENTMENT INDEX. Facts and figures, sketching the life of an average nobody. The world’s most boring episode of A&E Biography. I did learn (to my surprise because the evidence had been there all along) that the reason for my family’s abrupt 1976 move from Fort Worth to San Francisco had been due to my father declaring bankruptcy. Money arguments were the reason Nathalie divorced my father when I was twelve. So long, wicked stepmom; farewell, elder, bucolic, not-really-my-brother Clay.
I proceeded to flunk out of high school and rack up the usual misdemeanors for a surly teenager; nothing really toxic. At least I avoided becoming a crack addict, and I earned a driver’s license without mangling anyone in an automobile mishap. Academically, I bounced back with a halfhearted interest in becoming a draftsman or architect, mostly due to the brief but fatherly influence of Clay, who was always drawing things. Along came the SATs, and to everyone’s surprise I somehow managed to ace the English section of the test, a first for whatever high school I was in that year. (I’m sure if I click in the right place, I’ll find a complete listing.) I qualified for one of those entry-level scholarship/loan/grant packages and moved my ass to the University of California at Santa Barbara in the early 1980s. I switched to Business Administration in my second year, which was also the first and only time I’ve ever paid for an abortion. My girlfriend at the time was a Graphic Arts major named Barbara Stanns, and we broke up soon after I babysat the “therapeutic” D&C. AIDS was still brand-new. I learned to love latex.
The barnacles of my life accreted, slowly, steadily, uninterestingly. Remember, this is the part where we’re all supposed to be white-hot with youthful potential, steely-eyed and revolutionary, world-beaters.
Kroeger Concepts was a funky start-up company then, run out of Burt Kroeger’s rented house in Venice, back when Venice Beach was still hanging on to its last dregs of coolness. Now Santa Monica is mostly overrun by feckless TV executives with pattern baldness, nuclear families, and leprous overtanning.
Are you nodding off, yet?
It took me the better part of an hour to wade owlishly through my life in black and white, blinking cursor optional. There is something about verification wiping away suspicion; it makes you feel naked and vulnerable, as though the world has not been fooled by your posturing. It makes you afraid to dare. Perhaps that is the rationale for all those tiny forms of surveillance we accept as inevitable or necessary—those nagging instances of prying and disclosure that, ultimately, don’t seem as bad as the more horrifying concept of inconvenience. If you don’t buy the attitude I’m shoveling here, then check out your hard drive sometime and see how many cookies it has accumulated. All those companies and individuals have a line on you, oh yes they do.
Zetts resumed his command position and rolled through my data. He extended his hand back to me. “Here,” he said. “Eyedrops.”
It was a small black disc that looked like a key fob. Its middle was a plastic bag of fluid—imagine a Life Saver with a filling—and a lot of microscopic text in Japanese. The logo, in a ragged skatepunk font, read FX NEO. Obviously, you held the flat end of the disc near your eye and squeezed.
“Your eyes are like super-red, dude,” he said. I don’t know whether I was having a reaction to some allergen in the air, or I was on the verge of tears, weeping as my father had at approximately the same age. For better reasons.
My method has always been to tilt my head back, shut my eye, deposit drops in the shallow depression thus created, open eye to flood, repeat with other eye. I tried to make my face horizontal and did my best. The back of my head bumped the wall; it was still tender from its encounter with the DON’T WALK button. I managed to coax a few drops from the odd little device, and opened my eye.
“Wow—holy shit!” I jolted forward almost hard enough to bounce my face off the desk. At first my bare eyeball felt napalmed, then I realized the burning sensation . . . wasn’t. It was more as if I’d put an ice cube against it.
“It’s a rush, ain’t it?” said Zetts. “It’s mentholated. Japanese stuff is tit, dude.”
“Tit?”
He nodded like a convert. “Tit—good for hangovers, too.”
After the initial shock, my dosed eye receded into chilly, relieved bliss. My other, untreated eye was jealous of how this one now felt, so I rapidly dealt out another hit. Once you were used to the bang, this stuff worked superlatively.
“That feels . . . great,” I said, still amazed. My eyes were tingling.
“It’s a rush—like coke without the migraines or the paranoia. Like espresso for your eyeballs.”
“I want a gallon of this.”
“What’d you think of your dossier?”
“It makes me want to turn to the index in the back of the Book of My Life, to see where all the racy stuff is.”
“This is just keyhole data,” said Zetts. “The surface probe. The links will have more. Anything jump out at you?”
I was at a loss for something trenchant to say. “Nothing much.”
“Very bad for you, yo,” he said, without looking back. “Looks to me like your whole existence adds
up to zero, which means you have no threat potential at all.”
“Which is bad . . . right?”
“Bad for you. Remember whose files you’re stealthing. If you were no threat to them, they’d just purge you, man—simpler, easier, nobody kicks a stench.”
My life, as a fart. “But they haven’t purged me, Zee.” I shrugged helplessly. “I’m still here.”
“Thank Dandine. Here’s what I think: They would have demoted you at your apartment, except for Mr. D. Because unless you have leverage on them, you like sooo don’t matter.”
Unless I had leverage on them I didn’t know about, or had not figured out yet. “You’re talking about NORCO,” I said.
“Mm-hm. I know what you’re thinking: the heat’ll blow over. And for sure, if you were to go public right now, rejoin all the citizens, nothing would happen to you. They’d let you go back to your job, lay your ladies, and make a few more payments on your credit cards. Then, like two months later—blammo. You die in some unfortunate mishap. You slip in your tub. You accidentally drink Drano. Whoops, a ‘vehicular incident.’ Or they gauge your likelihood of a heart attack and proceed accordingly. Who inherits, when you bite the big one?”
“Nobody,” I said. “Kroeger has my power of attorney.”
“Wives, kids, parents?”
“Divorced, none, and dead.”
He turned to face me, constantly reevaluating me. “Like, no relatives?”
I shook my head. “Well, there’s always you and Dandine.”
Zetts grinned. “Cool. Leave me enough to buy a big-screen TV, wouldja?” I presumed he meant bigger.
“Sure. If I ever get out of here.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea, dude—you’re not a prisoner. You want to go, you go. But if I was you, I’d hang tight, like Mr. D says. Just a couple of hours. Give him time to work some angles. Then he shows up and you’re either a lot happier, or a lot more depressed. Better than just wandering the streets, right, waiting for the clock on you to start?”
He pointed at the computer. “Let’s consider the freak-out scenario, right? Sure, like, we coulda made all this shit up. Nobody who knows nothing about computers might buy it—all these switchbacks and ghost sites, right? This could be a total fake; most of the walking dead wouldn’t blink. But there’s like an alternate possibility, right?” He got that odd twinkle in his sharp blue eyes. “It might all be for real; what then?”
I felt an invisible anvil lift off my shoulders. I wanted this to be real; I needed it to be real. Everyone assumes they more or less recognize their own endings, and the terminus of their stories always comes as a surprise. For the first time in my apparently colorless life, I had lost that backstop, that surety of how I might wind up.
I could drown in my own life, right here on this monitor. I turned Zetts’s attention back to it. “Is Dandine in here?”
“Nahh, I tried that. Total dead end. Nada.”
“Can I look at this stuff some more?”
“Sure,” said Zetts, standing. “Go nuts. I’m gonna go, y’know, smoke a fatty and kick back. Unless you’d care for a taste.”
He didn’t wait for me to say no.
By now, you’re wondering where all this pathetic wallow leads. You check for files on Dandine and Zetts, knowing that Zetts knows you’ll try. There is nothing to read. All queries find no such files. You have no idea what alter egos to request. Reckless idiot that you are, you’ve used your real name your whole life.
You wanted to smack Zetts in the chops, when he jumped ahead, read your mind, and outlined the “freak-out scenario.” You feel lame and obvious, your every thought already broadcast on some subnormal frequency that alerts the players of the world to marks and suckers.
But wouldn’t Zetts have been instructed to say all that, as a means of allaying your natural suspicion and fear?
Wouldn’t Zetts need to act calm and noncommittal, and offer you the option of exit, so you could protest and refuse it?
Wouldn’t you like to head off this poisonous, lousy feeling about yourself at the pass, just one time?
You rise from the monitor with a reckless, risky plan already congealing in your slowpoke brain. Zetts sits in the middle of a cloud bank of dope smoke, nursing his version of the five o’clock martini and watching the news.
“Man called it, brah,” he says, indicating the TV.
The sound is turned down but you can imagine the hyperbolic play-by-play that accompanies the on-screen image of Linda Grimes, also known as “Choral Anne.” You remember the photo from her driver’s license. Now some studio munchkin has spent half an hour Photoshopping it to fit an appropriately hysterical logo within the video frame, titled Southland Woman Missing. No suspects or persons-of-interest attached to the developing story. Yet.
Leverage, as Zetts had pointed out.
You affect Zetts’s own attitude—loose, easy, uncaring—as you ask to read one of his Doc Savage paperbacks. Why not, what the hey, we’ve got time to kill, right? Zetts rises with a that’s-the-spirit camaraderie and fetches a title down from his shelf, jabbering about which ones are good to start with, if you haven’t read the entire series of 181 books in order. As he stands on a kitchen chair and reaches for a likely volume, you kick the chair out from under him, feeling like a shit but doing it anyway. Zetts cracks the obverse of his skull on the lip of the kitchen sink, during his fall to meet the floor. The chair skitters away and thin paperbacks go flying. You straddle Zetts as he flails about and put him down exactly the way you were incapacitated by the so-called Celeste, the mystery ninja who faked you out long enough for you to open your apartment door. You cock your arm back, flat-handed (as though you know what you’re doing; as though you’re some kind of fucking martial artist), and give Zetts everything you could throw behind the heel of your hand, just as he sits up. It sounds like a slap. Zetts’s eyes roll to white and he goes back down hard, legs spasming.
And you do all this thinking, I’m sorry—really.
Zetts’s pockets yield keys. You grab the cellphone off the kitchen table. There’s already a gun in the car. Queer, to think that if there is no backup key ring, you will be locking Zetts into his own house.
You go.
You leave the television on, for company, and ease back out into the world of the walking dead, thinking, seriously, I really am sorry, man. Really.
The cellphone was a bust. I tried back-calling Dandine from the memory menu, but only saw a splash of gobbledygook on the screen, like a high-kicking dance line of swear words from some old comic strip. Whatever piece of spy hardware Dandine had used to call Zetts, the damned thing was encrypted, secure, untraceable, and probably patched through landline exchanges in ten different states.
It occurred to me to wonder who I thought I was kidding, trying for slick, pretending I knew what I was doing, trying to outfox foxes.
Then, just like that (imagine the finger snap) . . . I suddenly knew where I was going.
I thought of wrestling alligators every time I cranked the wheel of Zetts’s GTO into a turn. Manual steering. The car grumbled and vibrated in an ominous and unfamiliar way, causing my pampered, automatic-everything reflex to howl and bitch. Working the five-speed shift seemed harder than calculus. I was doing an incredibly stupid thing, according to my rational mind, which warred with my inner cliff dweller, who was hollering about the damned car, barely under human control, and so on.
My navigational head fared slightly better. I remembered enough landmarks to get me back to the Sisters. Between 20th Century–Fox and MGM; right. I abandoned the metal objects on my person and approached the rear gate, carrying only the slim, handled paper bag I’d picked up at a wine shoppe en route. The wizened Mexican I had mistaken for a gardener faced me through the grillwork, his sawed-off, twelve-gauge pump casually resting on his shoulder, his index finger aligned alongside the trigger guard. He smiled.
“Nombre, por favor.”
“Mr. Lamb,” I said. “They should remember—”<
br />
He had already nodded and turned away.
1984/October 13: I lose my virginity to Carla Johnson at age eighteen.
You’re a late starter. At eighteen you have technically never dated, not in the sense “dating” is understood by your fellow seniors, regardless of the rules about male-female coupling that have been trashed and inverted by the slide of the late 1960s into the early-to mid-1970s. Nobody provided a handbook, because if they had, you would have understood that Carla Johnson was after a bit of nasty from line one. She simply wants to get drunk and fuck you. You insist on slopping it up with a lot of garbage from books, movies, fantasies, and your own ignorance. Ever since your cross-country wander at age ten, you have been shuffled from one public school to another as your father struggled to cope with his sudden divorce and changeling finances; hence, you have attended a different institution, with a different class of peers, each year from junior high onward. No continuity of friends or neighbors. You lead an unsettled life that prompts you to internalize and not form attachments, since the whole structure will morph, sure enough, before your next semester begins.
Childhood warps of this sort, it is theorized, make for good spies. Operatives to whom emotional discorporation is second nature. It is a survival skill, and a learned behavior.
Carla’s recreation is your turning point, despite all the messed up and misfired signals. She sets it up as a movie date, VCR-style, disguised as a homework appointment. While her parents are away golfing or sunburning or whatever it is they do in Palm Springs, several times a year. You both gobble pizza—her order, your treat.
The area between her legs is alien, speculative territory. It does not resemble the flayed, face-hugger lunchmeat of men’s magazines. It looks more like one of those very smooth French pastries, with a crease in the center. It feels, to your virgin fingers, basically like the roof of your own mouth, only slightly more yielding. If you attempt to inject your penis there by dead reckoning, it will wilt faster than a candle in a toaster oven at the first bump of resistance.
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