The Fourth Wall

by Williams, Walter Jon

  Bring ’em on, I think. Bring ’em on, and I’ll keep knocking ’em down. Beware the Watcher’s mad kung fu skillz!

  My cackle runs dry and I begin to cough. My throat aches. My head is whirling. I close my eyes until things stabilize a bit.

  When I open my eyes, I look at the blond man again. Despite the red eyes, he doesn’t look much like an assassin to me. I can’t help but think that professional assassins probably have access to more effective weapons than a metal pipe. I mean, even Trishula had a kitchen knife, and Trishula was pathetic.

  If I’d had my pistol where I could have reached it, neither of them would have stood a chance.

  I look at the pipe in my hands. It’s wrapped in cloth tape, like medical tape, and the tape is dented in several places where the pipe hit a hard surface like the metal door frame. When I see there’s blood on the tape I panic and begin patting myself on the head to see if I’ve been wounded, but then I realize the blood isn’t fresh, and that it’s Joey’s.

  OMG! I think. I brought down Joey’s killer! Maybe now I can find out what the fuck that was all about.

  I laugh as I ride another burst of euphoria. Then I look down at the blond man again. He’s showing no sign of coming back to consciousness. I spend a while trying to decide if I care about that.

  My thought processes do not seem to be functioning with quite their normal vigor.

  Eventually I decide I’d better figure out what’s actually happening with Assassin Man. I try to stand again, gasp at the pain in my thigh, and then sort of slide out of the chair onto the floor. I have to catch my breath again, and knead my thigh until the pain ebbs. Then I kneel by the blond man’s head and brandish the pipe overhead as I use my left hand to feel for a pulse in his throat.

  I can’t find a pulse, but I don’t know if that’s because there isn’t a pulse to be found, or because I’m simply useless at taking someone else’s pulse. I poke at the man’s throat for a while, shifting my fingers to a new place every few seconds. There’s not only no sign of a pulse, but no reaction at all.

  I stare at the man as I realize that I seem to have killed him. A nervous laugh bursts out of me. I wonder if I am in serious trouble.

  I decide I should try to summon assistance. My phone is on the makeup table, so I crawl to the table and grope around on top in search of it. A piece of broken glass stabs my finger, and I wince and snatch the hand back and suck blood from my fingertip. While I’m doing this I notice something that’s rolled under the table.

  It’s a syringe. I pick it up and look at it in surprise. I wonder if I was fighting some kind of junkie. Did the man have to get high before he could bring himself to attack me?

  I decide I’d better call for Astin and follow his advice about what to do next. I spin the chair around, then heave myself up and into my seat. The pain in my thigh brings tears to my eyes. From the chair I can see my phone, and I can also see that it’s been smashed. I sift through the broken mirror glass and look at the telephone parts and decide it can be put back together. I jam the battery and SIM card back into the handset and hold the apparatus together with my hand while I wait for the phone to come alive.

  Somewhat to my surprise the screen lights up, and the phone plays the little tune that tells me it’s connected to the network. I try to call up the speed dial directory so that I can call Astin, but my fingers are suddenly too clumsy to manipulate the phone. I try several times and keep pressing the wrong part of the screen. Suddenly I’m all thumbs. Then some vital part of the phone slips out of its proper place and the screen goes dark.

  I laugh and put the phone down on the table. Despite my clumsiness, I’m otherwise feeling pretty good.

  And then I start thinking about the syringe, and I remember that Joey was supposed to have been poisoned. I realize that the contents of the syringe might not have been for the blond guy, but for me. In sudden panic I start patting myself to see if I can find a needle poke.

  I remember the man hitting my thigh over and over again. I wonder if he had the syringe in his hand, if he unloaded a bunch of poison into my leg. I look at the fabric of my trousers but I can’t find a needle mark. Not that it’s likely there would be one.

  I decide it’s time to talk to Astin. He should be just downstairs, waiting in the car. I clamp my hands on the arms of the chair and heave myself upright. I cry aloud at the agony in my leg. Whatever may have been in that syringe, it hasn’t suppressed the pain at all.

  I lurch to the door and rest a while, leaning on the door frame. Then I set out down the corridor.

  All I have to do is walk to the end of the hall, turn right, walk down another corridor, pass Dagmar’s office, then go down the stairs. Under normal circumstances the walk would take maybe thirty seconds.

  I go reeling down the hallway, one hand trailing on the wall to keep my balance. I keep giggling and talking to myself. I realize when I’m halfway down the corridor that I’ve forgotten about my panic button, which would summon aid immediately. I haven’t seen it, so it must have got knocked off the table. Then, as I approach the corner, I get my bad leg twisted under me and I fall over.

  I laugh for a while over that, and then I make an effort to get on hands and knees. There seems to be something seriously wrong with my coordination.

  It must also be admitted that the floor is surprisingly comfortable. It feels like the softest, warmest mattress in the world. I wonder if I should lie here for a while and catch my breath.

  A faint, receding sense of urgency gets me to my hands and knees. I crawl to the corner, turn right, crawl some more.

  I am so very tired. I’ve been working very hard for months and I really deserve a rest. It’s only fair that I take a little break from all the aggravation in my life and catch up on my sleep.

  I pitch forward onto my face, and I think this is pretty funny.

  I remember thinking that all I need is a nap, and then I’ll be all right.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  TALE EXCLUSIVE: Kari Sothern reports that a drunk, stoned Sean Makin was seen being carried out of his dressing room by crew from a private ambulance.

  INT. EMERGENCY ROOM—DAY

  “Can you walk? Dagmar wants to see you.”

  It’s Richard. He’s padded into the emergency room on his white Converse sneaks, and now he stands in front of me, looking at me with his usual polite gaze. I sit on the edge of my examination table and look back at him.

  Well, I think, Dagmar probably won’t kill me in the hospital. “I’m supposed to sign some papers,” I say. “Give me a minute to do that.”

  Astin, it turns out, saved my life. He figured I was taking a shower, but after too many minutes passed and I didn’t turn up, he went in search of me. First to the shower rooms, and then upstairs; and when he found me collapsed in a heap, not breathing, he applied artificial respiration until the ambulance got there.

  The parameds figured that my respiratory system was depressed by an opioid and fired an inhaler of naloxone up my nose, and within about forty-five seconds I was sitting up, chatting with everyone, and feeling just about normal.

  Of course they don’t let you just walk away from something like that, so I got bundled into the ambulance and taken to Valley Presbyterian, where Dagmar had been carried the day before, and I underwent a whole series of tests that showed that, barring a few scrapes and the bone bruise on my thigh, I was in fine shape.

  I didn’t remember about the corpse in my dressing room until I was already in the ambulance, but even with the delay it didn’t take long for the police to turn up. These weren’t the detectives I’d met before, but a new bunch. They were deeply suspicious and I had to give them a lot of redundant background information, and they spent a lot of time on the phone talking to police who knew more about the case than they did. They encouraged the medics to check me for puncture wounds, of which they found only one, on my left thigh. This evidence that I wasn’t a junkie improved the cops’ view of me somewhat.

  I gave
a preliminary interview in the E-room, and agreed to come down to the station and make a more formal statement on Monday morning. I guess they figured that, as I was about the most recognizable face on the planet, I wasn’t much of a flight risk.

  Which left me there in the emergency room, amid the scent of clean laundry, plastic, and disinfectant.

  I sign the forms indicating that I am on my own and no longer the hospital’s responsibility, and then I limp out of the emergency ward and find Richard and Astin both waiting for me in the lobby.

  “You keep getting into trouble, man,” Astin says. “I’m just not going to let you out of my sight ever again.”

  “You do that,” I say. “By the way, is it your birthday? Because I feel like buying you a present.”

  Richard looks at his fancy watch. “This way,” he says.

  My leg hurts like a bastard. Astin offers to let me lean on him, but I decide I’m all macho and lurch on my own two legs all the way to the maternity ward.

  There I find Dagmar in a private room. She wears a white cotton nightie, and there’s a tiny pink infant in her arms. Ismet stands guard, pale and silent in a corner. Bouquets of flowers fill the room with a gentle floral scent. One of them, I assume, is the one I sent this morning.

  Dagmar looks up at me as I hobble in, her eyes narrowed.

  “You’ve had adventures,” she says, a bit accusingly.

  “So have you,” I point out.

  “Have a seat.”

  I gratefully drop into one of the chairs and stretch my aching leg in front of me. Richard quietly closes the door behind me. Despite his promise to keep an eye on me, Astin stays out in the corridor. Maybe he thinks I’m safe, maybe he’s just doing what he’s told.

  Surely she won’t kill me in the hospital, I think.

  Dagmar looks surprisingly healthy. Her cheeks are flushed, I guess with the blood they’ve poured into her, her skin tone seems good, and her gray hair has been combed and braided.

  “You look like you’ve bounced back,” I say.

  “I almost bled to death,” she says. She still has that accusing tone, like it was somehow my fault. “I spent ten minutes in nonstop labor in the car before I passed out, I had a C-section, and I almost died from shock. The baby almost died from blood loss, from hypoxia, and from an attack of tachycardia so bad that her heart almost exploded.” She closes her eyes. “At least they’re giving me the good drugs.”

  “I almost got murdered by one of Carter-Ann’s Psy-Ops guys,” I say, because I feel this fact ought not to be totally ignored. “He’s the man who killed Joey, if you hadn’t figured that out. And what’s the baby’s name, by the way?”

  A smile touches her lips. “Anna Fadime,” she says. “After my mother, and Ismet’s.”

  “And they let you hold her? She’s not stuck in an incubator?”

  Dagmar looks at me like I’m an imbecile. “She’s not premature. I was in my ninth month. This is a perfectly normal newborn.”

  “Uh,” I say, “good.”

  That pretty well exhausts my conversation on the subject of Dagmar’s baby. I was never a proper child myself, just a working stiff from the age of four, and it has to be admitted I don’t know much about children who aren’t holding down a steady job.

  “So,” I say, “did Carter-Ann send what’s-his-name to kill me?”

  “No,” Dagmar says. She’s still looking at her baby. “He was doing that on his own.”

  “And why is that?”

  She looks up. Her eyes flash. “Charles didn’t exactly send me a memo about what he was going to do and why.”

  Charles, is it? I think. “Give me your best guess,” I say.

  “Nietzsche,” says Ismet, “said something to the effect that every cause inspires someone who, through his fanatic profession of the cause, drives other people away. Charles was like that.”

  I look at him. “If that was meant to make anything more understandable, it completely failed.”

  Ismet raises his hands, then lets them fall. “He believed in the project. Believed totally. He was trying to protect it.”

  “Like Trishula,” Dagmar says. “Trishula believed in Babaji, and when you attacked Babaji, Trishula attacked you. He didn’t think of himself as the aggressor, he thought he was defending something he believed in.” She presses her lips together into a white line, and then speaks. “Charles thought you were a danger to the project. You and Joey both. After you told us that you thought Joey had killed Jaydee and Nataliya, we had an emergency meeting. Carter-Ann was out of town, so Charles stood in for her.” Her eyes turn stony. “Apparently Charles decided to take action on his own.”

  Richard clears his throat. “My surmise is that he hid in Carter-Ann’s suite at the Lang Towers. He had access to her rooms, he was in and out all the time. He went to see Joey, banged him on the head, then gave him a fatal overdose.”

  “If you’re going to hit him with a pipe anyway,” I say, “why not just beat his head in?”

  Dagmar looks aghast. I think that maybe she’s seen a little too much of that kind of violence in her time.

  “Hitting him like that would be messy,” Ismet offers. “You’d get blood on yourself. Drugs are quieter and, I suppose, more merciful.”

  “And Carter-Ann supplied the drugs,” I say. They all look shocked.

  “No,” Dagmar says. “She’s not—” She strives for words. “She’s difficult, I’ll admit that.”

  “She’s a freak,” I say. “And I say this as a freak who knows a freak when he sees one.”

  Dagmar is annoyed at my interruption. “She’s someone Sri picked,” she says, “someone who worked with him on some of his education projects. But she’s not a killer.”

  I must look skeptical. Richard responds.

  “Carter-Ann told me that Charles used to work as a counselor in the county hospital rehab center. My guess is that if he kept in touch with some of his former patients, he could get any amount of drugs he wanted. All he’d have to do is take any street drug and cook it down to increase the potency.”

  I decide to let that go. No doubt the police will determine whether the drugs were from the street or the pharmacy.

  “Joey was killing other people on the movie,” I say. “I can see how…Charles…would disapprove. But how did I get to be such a threat?”

  Ismet gives me an unreadable gaze. “You looked at my laptop. You tried to download my files.”

  Richard clears his throat. “You tried to cover that up,” he says. “But we’re better than that.”

  I shrug. I’m trying to seem casual. “So I found out that Sri is mining data from the Great Big Idea customers in order to make money. So what? Data mining happens all the time.”

  There is silence. I look at Dagmar and her two samurai, one standing on either side of the bed, and they are all looking at me without sympathy. I’m beginning to feel as if I may be facing a firing squad.

  “You listened to the sound files,” Ismet says.

  I was very much hoping that they wouldn’t have noticed that.

  I shrug again. “You’ve got a bunch of files of foreigners talking to each other. Big deal.”

  Again I face the silence. Dagmar narrows her eyes.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so,” she says, “you’re being a little disingenuous.”

  I doubt I’d be any happier if I actually knew what disingenuous means. I flap my hands.

  “I don’t care what Sri does to make money,” I say.

  “You must know,” Richard says, “that making these recordings is illegal.”

  I glare at him. “You were the one who said it wasn’t illegal to spy!”

  Anna Fadime stretches, yawns, arches her back, and goes back to sleep. The three of them watch this with tenderness mixed with a rather ferocious protectiveness.

  Christ, I think, Anna Fadime is going to grow up with this crowd protecting her—like the Three Hundred Spartans, only with better tech. I pity any kid who bullies her on th
e playground.

  “It’s not about money,” Dagmar says. “It’s about the baby.”

  “I don’t care,” I insist. “I was just trying to find out why people were dying, and now I know. So I don’t care about the rest of it.”

  “That won’t wash, I’m afraid.” Dagmar looks at me and gives a little nod of her chin, as if confirming something to herself. “Sooner or later,” she says, “you’re going to wonder what is so special about our project that a qualified psychologist like Charles would kill people to protect it. Do you really think he’d do that over Sri’s profits?”

  “He might if he had a piece of them,” I say. “Maybe you all do.”

  “I think it’s safer,” Dagmar says, “if you actually become a part of our criminal conspiracy.”

  I’m truly getting exasperated. All I want is to convince them of my harmlessness, and they won’t let me do that. Now I’m supposed to sign a blood oath or whatever it is that Mafia soldiers do.

  “I’m really not interested,” I say.

  Ismet glowers at me from behind his glasses. “We don’t really care whether you’re interested or not.”

  I give up. “Yeah, fine. Whatever.”

  Dagmar looks down at the baby again, and strokes the wisp of fine dark hair on its forehead. “I’ve been through a certain amount of chaos in my life,” she says. “Friends of mine were murdered. I’ve been caught in…in civil disorder.” Her eyes are haunted. “Riots. Revolutions. Nasty stuff.” She looks up at me. “I was trying to get pregnant, and I realized I wanted to lower the odds of anything like that happening to my child. So I approached Sri with a proposition, and…” She waves a hand. “Miracles happened.”

  I could imagine that. When billionaires want things to happen quickly and don’t care how much money they spend, things happen quickly indeed.

  “We’re doing things on several levels,” Dagmar says. “We’re attracting a worldwide audience, mostly young people, and we’re integrating them into our social network. People from different cultures are encouraged to encounter one another, and to profit from Roheen’s example of courage, compassion, and cooperation.” She shrugs. “Eventually they’ll lose interest in Roheen, but we’ll find something else to catch their attention.”