by Jim Nisbet
“Winner! Ding ding ding …”
“Not to panic,” soothed the speaker. “Once the dome is constructed, we’ll leave a few doors open and flood the place with fire ants.”
“Fire ants? Fire ants, did she say? Fire ants … !”
The speaker folded her arms across her chest and appeared very smug. “An Avogadro number of fire ants.”
“That’s brilliant!” enthused a statistician. “The great storms in east Texas coincident congruent to the Era of Non-Compliant Weather Models has us knee deep in surplus fire ants.”
“Brilliant!” yelled the claquers.
“Perfect!” agreed others.
“Everybody will leave,” hundreds roared. “Can’t stand no,” cued Condor Silversteed’s seventh consecutive No. 1 hit, “fire factions, pow pow, pow pow pow, f-f-f-factions …”
“What an artist!” whispered an awed denizen of the Very Important Apparatchik. “The very apotheosis of prolepsis!” soughed another.
The hubbub rose to a cacophony of argumentation, pontification, vituperation, the whole tempered withal by enthusiasm and doubt. The speaker wielded her twenty-eight-ounce Japanese framing gavel, so beautiful in design and fabrication, it looked as if she were about to smite the podium with a stainless steel orchid. The headache quantized accordingly. “There is a solution,” the speaker winced. “Ladies and gentlemen, there is a solution … !”
The map of the Purse of Oil reappeared on the screen, a grid of triangles and hexagons superimposed upon it.
“Construction time: ten years. Cost: seven trillion Euroshells …”
“Euroshells!” came the shocked response.
“Why Euroshells?” someone shouted.
The Speaker shrugged. “More hell for the shell.”
Some speculators laughed, some speculators cried. “It is The Fiduciary Territory Imposed By Progress,” intoned the announcer in his best basso profundo.
The Speaker nodded slowly. “And what of the additional two or three million who will have fled?” she reminded them. “Will they not be of sufficiently resilient and coherent stock to re-seed their cultures?” She folded her arms. “Where’s the goddamn problem?”
Several audience members made sounds like a buzzer on a door lock. “That’s a humanitarian issue!” Others took up the cry. “Out of the bounds of the debate!”
“Oh, of course,” the speaker responded. “I’d forgotten.”
“Oh, of course!” They all laughed at the quaint joke. The speaker had forgotten! That’s what a good night’s sleep in the XolotelTM, otherwise known as the backyard, will get you. Proof positive!
“Visionary!” stipulated a telegate.
“The speaker makes sense in her sleep!” enthused a hologate.
“All in all, it will be no different than working on the moon. Heckafucking employment opportunities …”
Nothing happened.
The speaker leaned into the microphone. “Jobs?” she prompted. “Jobs, you knuckleheads!”
The place went nuts before eventually dissolving into contented laughter. “No singing.” The speaker glanced at an imaginary watch on her wrist. “Not until Condor Silversteed holos in at eleven hundred hours!”
“Winner! Ding ding ding …”
Everybody cheered. But before the crowd could erupt despite the conspicuous silence of the claquers, the speaker held up both hands. “Please reserve your passionate subjectivity until then.”
The crimson dot of the laser pointer spiraled.
“The Shrine,” the speaker concluded, “will be erected in the very heart of the Hafiza min Zayt.”
The dot held steady at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. “Every hundred kilometers or so, transverse tunnels through the ripstop—heavy security of course—will periodically be opened to accommodate Bedu migration, as well as limited commerce, because, after all, we can’t eliminate people altogether. Not yet, anyway!” Sustained laughter …
… Quentin, said a voiceover in the dream, where are you? I’m having my first authentic political nightmare while actually asleep …
Oscar Few spent the night in Pirates Cove.
It happened to be a night of extraordinary clarity. After he’d parked a month’s worth of tapes under the century plant, he lay in his sleeping bag on the driftwood platform built over a crevice well above the tide line and counted stars and constellations. Some he could name, some he made up names for. Arcturus which is a constituent star in Boötes, Pygmalion, Virgo, Sagittarius, Cygnus, and Bellerophon, as well as Alice, the Rabbit, and the Mad Hatter.
Truth of the matter was, although he could spot a mad zealot in a radio-neutral suit from forty yards, the only constellations he was really sure of were the Big Dipper, Orion, and the Pleiades. He liked the story that the latter were named for the seven daughters of Atlas who were metamorphosed into stars, despite the fact that only six of the stars are visible to the naked eye. This stuff is hard to keep up with, but not so hard as keeping up with the Cavalcade of Wonders, he reminded himself with a shudder. Not to mention the net they somehow manage to cast. When was he going to meet a woman he could talk to? And there were Mars and Venus, too, but they aren’t constellations. Which reminded him of a t-shirt which proclaimed, Pluto: Always Remember. As to the rest—the Crab, the Bear, the Archer—or was the Archer also called Orion?—he knew their names but not those of their constituent stars.
He also knew that, in China, these same constellations were called Rat, Dog, Boar, Snake, Dragon, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Ox—like that; because, like the Greeks long after them, the ancient Chinese, too, had, you know, imagination and stars to foist it on.
Nice and simple. That’s the way he liked his explanations.
Either way, the night sky was a wonder seldom paid attention to, these days, by man or beast—and there goes a satellite. Someday there’ll be orbiting prison platforms—and he would be possessed of an Extraterrestrial Vehicle Identification Scanner by which to log them. Gitmo_6 would no doubt be the name of one of them, although ex-cons in the know would refer to it as Tweeker’s_Roost. But, except for the cassette tapes, he never carried any tech along on these solo hikes. He spent enough time dealing with tech. Besides, even cellphones didn’t work out here, let alone non-existent ETVIS units. Although, he sighed, that too, might one day change.
He lay on his back, gazing up at the night sky, nary a cloud above him, only the nimbus of San Francisco to the south, the city itself hidden by the loft of Coyote Ridge, with the big Pacific rollers booming and seething against the rock outcrop that rose out of the surf on the south side of little cove like a big stump. Stump Rock, in fact, was its name. Maybe thirty feet high and not more than ten feet across at the top, it wasn’t a difficult climb, at low tide, and in his long-gone youth he’d spent many an hour up there sunning himself. Occasionally he still took the trouble to wade out and climb it. The last time, at least a year ago, he’d noticed that some long gone pothead had left a pipe with a baggie up there, in a cleft between rocks under a stunted coyote bush. He’d ignored them for a long time until, noting that the marijuana had turned solid black with mildew, he’d taken a look. Nothing special. A little pipe made of plumbing parts, the weed was mostly shake and no bud with lots of seeds; a cop knows about these things. Two of the seeds had sprouted within the residual humidity of the bag and subsequently shriveled. All of it turned to dust at his touch. And this led him to the conclusion that, despite its proximity to a metropolitan area whose population exceeded six million people, it had been a long time since anybody had taken the trouble to scramble up to the top of Stump Rock.
Stretched out on the platform above the surf he could hear the intermittent buoy off Duxbury Reef, six or seven miles due west. He rolled over. After a minute or two he picked it out, flashing green. He counted the flashes. One came every six seconds. It was a so-called whistle buoy, but the whistle sounded more like a forlorn moan, its audio driven by and therefore subject to the whims of the swells, and he’d loved it
since he was a boy. He fancied that it must be the most melancholy sound he’d ever heard.
This thought caused him to remember a guy last seen pushing his surfboard off Abalone Flats, at the northern end of Duxbury Reef, a mile or so north of the buoy and the reason for its placement. A curious bystander asked him where the fuck he thought he was going, because there was no surf to be had west of there for some 3,000 miles.
“I’m looking for a good dentist,” the guy told him.
Officer Few had read about it in the Chronicle. So it must be true.
Take me with you, man, Few said to himself, not even half facetiously.
THIRTY-TWO
CEDRIC OSAWA SMELLED THE BRICK ON THE CHART TABLE THROUGH TWO layers of seven-mil visquine before he sniffed out the light switch. In fact, having detected the former, he skipped the latter.
Anybody else would have smelled Cedric Osawa first. He’d been on the road for two weeks without a bath. A number of the conveyances he’d been aboard were abluted far less frequently than that, and many of the odors to be encountered were adhesive and communicable. He’d left Vegas without showering, haunted by indigestion and dreams full of nostalgia, strange portents, and the apparently permanent mind-worm of a snake that quacks like a duck.
Cedric himself, though inured, could discern the redodences of popcorn, of fluid attributable to the human condition, of flea and roach powder, compressed air, skunk, disposable diapers, combusted tobacco, molten upholstery, antifreeze, roofing tar, pine sap, newsprint, burnt coffee, unbleached wool, clove bidis, chlorine bleach, mildewed books, vulture neck feathers, the Four Corners power plant, gun powder, burning tires, rubbing alcohol, acetone, xylene, toluene, carbon tetrachloride, carpet mold, gorgonzola cheese, No. 2 diesel, sweet basil, decomposing chitin, sintered brake linings, and …
Justine.
Cedric didn’t know one couture cologne from another, let alone Justine. But if Justine is anything it’s unique, and Cedric recognized it as a significant deviation from the stink of the everyday, of the hoi polloi, and of most navigable vessels. Plus it was new. Its freight aboard the olfactory after deck gave him pause.
Still, the light switch could wait.
Cedric tuned the short-range night vision that had enabled him to avoid a collision with many an unilluminated breakwater, and scanned the cabin. Lights from adjacent vessels penetrated the yacht’s lites here and there. The yellow loom of a municipal dock light slanted down the bridge companionway.
Justine. He reached for another name. Male or female? Immediately upon the assumption, pheromones pressed the air. It was involuntary. A certain levity returned the metabolic semaphore. Deadly levity. Levity implied perversion. Propaganda. A deliberate mistake.
Despite his concentration, he recalled the snake.
Shushupe, native to the high Amazon Basin, is nocturnal, long, and extremely venomous. It is also wiley. Shushupe finds a game trail, coils itself into a pile, and quacks like a duck. In the dark, it sounds just like a duck. Might it smell, as well, like Justine?
In broad daylight, it would probably sound just like a snake.
Having sounded just like a duck, shushupe waits with unhinged fangs.
The methodology must work, for the species thrives.
Why not name an odor for a snake?
One trip up the Amazon was all Cedric Osawa had required. Of the twenty-six venomous reptiles cataloged in one of the appendices of Clark’s book, he remembered only shushupe. But shushupe was enough. A surfeit, really. If you ordered a Greyhound bus full of poisonous snakes, and only one shushupe turned up, you could sign the bill of lading. After that trip, and once this one was over, Cedric would re-up for the snakeless isles of the Caribbean Basin, and turn his back on the reptile catalog of The Rivers Ran East.
The lesson, however? Easy. If it quacks like a duck, it may not be a duck.
… So maybe it isn’t a cologne for women. Maybe it’s a men’s cologne. Maybe it’s a woman’s cologne on a man. The mores of the mainland can be so deceptive.
Meanwhile, if that isn’t a brick of blow on the chart table, Cedric Osawa is a duck’s uncle, for whom the snake of fate can wait.
The snake of fate does wait. It’s one of the things it does best.
His footfalls on the carpet of the saloon were soundless. A dock line creaked. Along the pier a halyard plaintively flagellated its aluminum mast and fell silent.
A shadow arced over the row of windows to port. Cedric tensed. The shadow landed on the dock in full view.
Night heron.
A west coast bird with whose east coast cousin Cedric was familiar. But just a bird, after all.
His shoulders remained as tense as newly tuned rigging. Accustomed as he was to medicating various ailments accumulated over a lifetime of physical endeavor, some part of Cedric texted with that part of his cortex concerned with such things. Yo, U B hurtN. U B holdN? U B Kray-Z. Yo fool! U need tht brik 2 hit U upside U hed befo U geddown wid it?
Years and years ago, Cedric had taken a shotgun to a television. To consolidate the mess, he’d removed the television from his boat to a nearby dumpster arena. Gave the TV both barrels. Most satisfactory. Now he’d like to give both barrels to his mental server. U, yo. Kind of tricky, though. Might take out the host, too. As went the television, it might have been nice to take out the host too, but it doesn’t work like that. It works like, take out all the entities you want, the host lives on.
Fukkin insidious, yo.
Tired as he was, Cedric recollected himself. He wasn’t sure what he’d do when Red showed up. Kill him outright? Probably best. Cedric wasn’t one for the lingering adiós of torture. Plus Red was dangerous. But no rush. Tonight or tomorrow or the next day, Cedric would settle a score.
Man O man I B tired, Cedric thot. My brain, Cedric thought, seems to be making a cameo appearance in the texted movie of its own existence. When’s the last time I saw a movie? Decades. Why should I sit through a movie when—this is serious, man. Wake the fuck up. Before you hit the mainland, you never even heard of texting.
Cedric wanted to wake the fuck up, as his brain would have it, but he was, in fact, bone weary. Wasting a night on that asshole’s car in Miami took some energy, sure. But taking a bus all the way across the goddamn United States took way more. He should have stayed in that hotel in Vegas and slept for a week. Better it should have been in Palm Springs. Bakersfield? It would appear that the business with the knife was going to cost him a lot of time and a lot of sleep. Fucking asshole bureaucrat. Two weeks on the bus and a missing knife had helped Cedric catch up on current events. “Fucking asshole country gets its architectural penis cut off by fucking fanatics and what does it do?” a guy who got on in Albuquerque and got off in Flagstaff told him. “Declares war on two countries. Flails around like a thousand-pound semi-aquatic, egg-laying mammal with a ripped toenail. You heard me. That’s what it does, and it flattens any number of hapless cultures and jack-lit people while it’s doing so.”
“And dings me for a knife I’ve had for thirty years.”
“Yeah.” Yeah.
It’s a wonder they didn’t blow up the Bahamas while they were at it. I guess I should consider them and me fortunate in that regard. And if Charley hadn’t gotten his ticket punched I’d be on the hook in some quiet cove with me precious Lacayan forkéd nose pipe and a wahine and a quart of rum and a half-decent guitar. … Altogether, an alternate reality.
Cedric gave up. Fuck it, fuck them, and fuck you, whoever it them and you are. I can take out Red Means no matter what shape I’m in.
He crossed the cabin. He’d hefted a few bricks in his time—bales, bundles, bushels, and suitcases, too. He made this brick for good weight. A righteous one thousand grams. Two point two pounds.
The night heron emitted a quock and recrossed the port- and dock-side lites. Cedric froze. Birds and snakes are related—no? Scales became feathers—no? Other way around? California has exactly one poisonous snake, he consoled himself, and it doesn
’t quack.
The night heron rose and settled on the next boat over with a thump.
Cedric forced himself to swallow.
The next boat over was a Cal 20. The entire boat, rigging, house, decks, tiller, cockpit, even its dock lines, was flocked in black mold. What showed white was seagull guano or, as witnessed, the droppings of a night heron. Bluish white, by the yellow mercury light. The color of …
Cedric’s new knife made quick work of the gray duct tape, the black polyethylene, and the clear vacuum-sealed plastic within. He didn’t need to turn on a light to get a better look. Cocaine, too, has a certain odor. Cocaine smelled to Cedric like ice smells to an Eskimo, like home, like the great outdoors, like yo natural habitat. It smells like one kind of ice as opposed to all the other kinds of ice. It smells like the blade of a harpoon left overnight on the sled under an exuberant aurora borealis.
Cedric put the new knife to work. He chipped a quantity off the brick onto the door of the countertop reefer, hacked at it for a while, aligned the resulting smithereens into four rails like he was building a switchyard for the Sierra Pacific, and then rolled a hundred dollar bill into a tube with a quarter-inch diameter, helped himself, and, soon enough, Cedric found himself thinking he was thinking straight.
Charley Powell, now, what a study.
Many’s the adventure Cedric and Charley had shared. Boats in all weathers, for example. Although they’d never, Cedric thought, glancing at the Cal 20, gone out in a boat that fucked up.
Fucked up in a boat, however, Cedric thought, as he happily doubled down, that much we’ve done. “Winner!” oddly occurred to him. “Pow pow, pow.” Goddamn that Las Vegas. Justine. Cedric hesitated over the rolled bill. Quock. Cedric glanced out the window.
The night heron had moved. Now it stared into the black water between the boat and the dock.
The boat tested its dock lines.
Just above Cedric’s head, the bail of a brass lamp creaked.
Cedric sniffed. Not kerosene. Odorless lamp oil.
And a singed wick.
