by Paul Neilan
“He was a hack,” the Rev said. “God rest his soul.”
“I liked that Anne Frank bit he did,” the red-haired girl said. “Poor kid must be mortified, all those people reading her diary. And truth be told, it is a little weird. Some guy, sitting on a park bench. Hey, what’s that you’re reading? A little girl’s diary. [Whisper] She’s dead. What? Oh, you mean Anne Frank. Who?”
It was a dead-on Eddie Lompoc impersonation. I told her so.
“Thanks,” she said. “No one’s really gone if you’re still making fun of them.”
“To Eddie Lompoc’s immortality,” the Rev said, raising his glass. “His Genesis. In the beginning was a cucumber in the end.”
“He have any problems with anyone, Eddie Lompoc?” Sidowsky said. “Any grudges?”
They looked at the Rev.
“What? I’m the one who picked out his tombstone,” the Rev said. “And why are you asking us? What about the guy who threatens to kill everybody every night?”
We looked over at Charlie Horse’s table. He raised his glass like he’d been listening.
“Hold up,” CMB Roach said. “Is somebody gonna mention the fruit my boy had up his ass when he choked hisself out, or is that somebody gotta be me.”
“It just was,” the Rev said.
“Vegetable,” the red-haired girl said.
“Huh!” CMB Roach said.
“A cucumber’s a vegetable,” the red-haired girl said.
“Naw,” CMB Roach said. “You serious? A cucumber and a vegetable is the same?”
He thought about it for a while.
“This is how it was, y’all,” CMB Roach said. “I wanted to put a vegetable in my salad one day. But I didn’t. Cuz I thought it was wrong. Cuz I thought, that’s not how the world is. That’s not what salad supposed to mean. Not for the CMB. And I hated that. I hated that about the world. About myself. That they told the CMB what a salad had to be and I listened. And I was ashamed. I became the Roach to survive. And I did. I thrived. I got vegetables. I got salad. But naw son, you ain’t never gettem at the same time. See there’s a salad course. And there’s a vegetable course. Or they puttem on the side, in like a bowl or something. Maybe like a cup. I don’t know! Cept now I do. See, it took my boy Eddie Lompoc choking hisself out for me to find, that vegetables was in my salad the whole time. Damn.”
“What?” the Rev said.
“He’s right,” Sidowsky said.
“What?” the Rev said.
“That word has a lot of different meanings,” the red-haired girl said. “And not one of them applies to anything that I just heard.”
“The cucumber makes it more personal,” Sidowsky said.
“You think a cucumber in the ass makes it more personal?” the red-haired girl said. “That must’ve been some honeymoon, Detective.”
“It’s Desmond,” Sidowsky said. “And I’m not married. To the job or anything else.”
“Girlfriend?” the red-haired girl said.
Sidowsky shook his head.
“I’m Beatrix,” she said.
“Christ,” the Rev said. “I’m getting another drink.”
I stood up from the table, followed CMB Roach to the bathroom. He stopped at the door.
“What’s with you, son?” CMB Roach said, too close, head bobbing at me like a chicken. “Coming to the Roach’s flop, bringing you a cop, stepping on the CMB like he some dirty-ass mop. You gone need a witness, when y’all swing ya miss, talking nonexpression at my place a business. Not in my town, fuck yo droopy-ass frown, ride you in the ground like some filly at Preakness. My flow is crucial, ain’t no commercial, Grid be hid when I spit my gospel. They talking bout a comet like they know what it is, but it ain’t it just was, now you lissen to this. I the meteor ha! you the dinosaur—”
“What was Eddie Lompoc working you for,” I said, taking a step.
“I don’t know man!” CMB Roach said, backing against the door. “Bitch wanted to get into fvrst chvrch mvlTverse. Not to join or nothing. Jailbreak his ass in like. E Lompy be talking bout the Records Room up on the third floor. Records Room. Room a records. Records is rumors they writin down as true, but if you wudn’t in the room then you don’t know who who—”
“Draw me a map,” I said.
* * *
I waited under an overhang, looked at the map CMB Roach had drawn. By midnight the mansion at 6765 Franklin was completely dark, fvrst chvrch mvlTverse shut down for the night. I’d been there almost an hour. There were no lights, no activity. The spires loomed ghostly in the dark.
I gave it more time. Listened to the rain fall, spattering the overhang. Then I went to the service entrance around back and punched in the code CMB Roach had written, 2584. The gate clicked open. I went down the sloping drive, around the corner. At the next keypad I punched another code, 3455. The door opened. I slipped inside.
I shut it quick behind me, waited for my eyes to adjust. There was a dull glow from the tessellated floor. I heard a low hum, droning. It wasn’t an insect chorus. This was mechanized. I knelt down, laid my hand flat on the swirling tile. I felt a vibration, coming up through the floor.
I crept down the hallway, listening. Through a doorway and down another hall, into the darkened atrium. I saw the bronze curves of phi, gleaming in the dark. The birds were all asleep. I went through the archway, took a right at the corner, followed CMB Roach’s map to a steel door, unlocked. A set of stairs, leading up.
I took them to the third floor, the hum growing faint and disappearing below. I followed the map to a door at the end of the hall. At an oblong keypad, I punched the number, 10946. It opened on the circular Records Room, housed in a turret, file cabinets built into the rounded walls. The drawers were all numbered. 17711, 28657, 46368 in random leaps. There was no order to any of it. I tried the first one.
It was full of building schematics. Blueprints of the surrounding neighborhood, the Hills, topography surveys.
I tried another.
Invoices from different companies. Apex Data Molding, Deeptech Info Systems, Carlsonic Solutions.
None of it meant a thing to me.
I tried the third drawer. Didn’t hear the footsteps behind me until it was too late.
A thick arm closed around my neck like a python. I didn’t struggle. There wasn’t much point. The blade of a butterfly knife glinted close to my eye.
“You fucking punks,” the guy behind the knife said. “Method acting your breaking and entering when you don’t know shit about either. It’s a fucking craft. Treat it with some respect.”
He dragged the blade slow down my cheek.
“Go turn on the lights, Boo,” he said. “I wanna see this prick’s face when I carve him up.”
“I have to hold him, Sal,” Boo said.
“Let him go,” Sal said, fluttering the knife, rolling the blade over his hand like he’d been practicing. “He moves, I’ll gut him.”
The thick arm slackened and released. Boo went back to the door, flipped the switch. The lights came up.
“Let me count the ways I’m gonna cut you,” Sal said, spinning the blade. “Say goodbye to your leading man days.”
“I’m not an actor,” I said, watching the knife. “You are.”
“What the fuck did you just say?” Sal said, pushing the tip of the blade between my eyes, tipping my chin back.
“You’re convincing is all,” I said. “Got a real presence.”
I’d seen too many of his type to be wrong. He kept pressure on the blade, then snatched it away.
“Yeah, I played a few heavies,” Sal said, thumbing his chin as he flipped the knife closed. “You seen Broccolis and Bracioles? How about The Last Paisan? I was Joey Zaza.” He hunched his shoulders, laid his hands out flat. “Aye how’s ya family? Good, good.”
“I was Doorman Number Two, but they didn’t give me no lines,” Boo said. He was a head taller than Sal and twice as wide, both of them bald as hard-boiled eggs. Neither of them had eyebrows.
“I can act,” Boo said.
“Yeah, act like an asshole,” Sal said.
“Aww jeez. Come on, Sal,” Boo said, wounded. He stared at me. “He don’t seem like no actor, Sal.”
“Yeah who the fuck are you anyway?” Sal said. “Pat him down, Boo.”
Boo found my clip, the map, the Polaroid of Anna.
“Harrigan,” Sal said, reading my license. “Who’s the skirt?”
“Her name’s Anna,” I said.
“You here looking for her?” Sal said.
“Something like that,” I said.
“Yeah, well, names don’t mean nothing in this place,” Sal said, passing the picture to Boo. “No I’s, no U’s. Half the time you can’t tell the difference between the guys and the broads. Half the time you don’t want to. Fucking baldies.”
Boo held on to the Polaroid for a long time before handing it back to me.
“What’s that sound downstairs?” I said. “Coming up from the floor.”
Sal bit off a smile. Boo shook his head like a child holding a secret.
“You want to see some shit?” Sal said.
“I don’t know, Sal,” Boo said. “We’re not supposed to let nobody down there.”
“Don’t worry about it, Boo,” Sal said. “Hit the lights. Let’s take a walk.”
I followed them out of the room, down another hallway to a heavy steel door.
“What made you think I was an actor?” I said as Boo opened it.
“We caught a guy last week,” Sal said as we descended a spiral staircase, the hum growing louder. “He was in here snooping around. He tried to be a tough guy about it, until I took one of his eyebrows. Then he starts crying, saying he’s got a callback in the morning, this was just a gig. Please, I just got new head shots. Please!”
Sal laughed.
“Who hired him?” I said.
“He didn’t know nothing,” Sal said. “Said the guy was wearing a Zodiac ring, like most of the fucking jerkoffs in this town.”
The sound was all around us, the door at the bottom of the stairs vibrating like a tomb about to burst.
“Sal—”
“Open the fucking door, Boo,” Sal said.
He opened the door onto a hive of conveyor belts, robotic arms breaking down screens of all sizes like an assembly line in reverse.
“All the recycling gets done in another room,” Sal said. “Fucking bottles and cans. The paper gets scanned, whatever it is. But anything with a memory comes through here.”
“They hack the screens before they get wiped?” I said, watching the machines work, pulling the memory cards from the screens and feeding them into scanning slots. The data scrolled on banked monitors, continuously processing. “Why?”
“Fuck if I know,” Sal said. “Nobody tells us nothing. This whole place is a fucking racket. Bunch a assholes dragging garbage cans all over the city, picking up trash in the rain.”
“We’re getting out soon, me and Sal,” Boo said.
“Fucking right we are,” Sal said.
“Why get in in the first place?” I said. “You two don’t seem too worried about the mvlTverse.”
“I only joined cause of the models,” Boo said.
“Fuck you, you only joined cause of me,” Sal said. “I only joined cause of the models.”
I looked at them both as the conveyor belts whirred around us.
“You didn’t hear about the models?” Sal said. “Fuck, man, where you been? Few months back this place was nothing. Nobody gave a shit. If they had half a brain they still wouldn’t. Then these busloads of models started rolling down Hollywood Boulevard every morning. Broads hanging out the windows, blowing kisses, all of them pulling in here. Then at night they’d leave. Same thing the next morning. Nobody knew what was going on. You figure model sex parties at the mvlTverse mansion, right? Sex cult, sex dungeon. Sex something. Gotta be. That’s when I joined up.”
“Me too,” Boo said.
“Most of the fucking dudes in here came for the models. The broads too. Then they shave you fucking bald and tell you to recall shit you can’t remember, even if you wanted to. Put you in fucking pajamas and make you pick up garbage like some cueball chain gang,” Sal said. “Every dick’s a dick in the mouth. Every shit’s a shithead. Same fucking nonsense, twenty-four seven.”
He shook his head.
“And you know what?” Sal said. “The whole time we been here, haven’t seen one fucking model.”
Boo was nodding along.
“Not one.”
tuesday
A steady knocking on the door woke me early the next morning. Too early.
“Who’s the fairest of them all?” Anton said, out of breath, when I opened the door.
I looked at him.
“She told me to tell you, if you were ever in a spot and you needed help, that’s what you should say,” he said. “I thought maybe I could say it too, even though she told me not to. But I never get to say what I want anymore without saying sorry right after, you know?”
The rain was pouring down on him. I stepped aside, let him inside.
His curly hair was plastered to his head. He looked like he’d swam over, gotten lost a few times along the way.
“This is your place?” Anton said, looking around. “Where’s your screen?”
“In my pocket,” I said.
“Yeah but, you don’t have another one?” he said. “It’s an Optimization principle that everyone have at least one wall-size—woah! What’s that?”
He stared at the map on the wall.
“It’s a map of the world,” I said.
“It is?” he said, blinking. “It looks so much different from the ones I’m used to.”
“Drink?” I said.
“Do you have any coffee?” he said, still staring at the map.
I put the drip on. Poured some whiskey in my own when it was done. Anton was sitting at my table when I came back with his cup.
“Thanks,” he said, taking a long drink with both hands. “I didn’t sleep again last night. Have you heard the theory that rapid blinking can mimic REM and induce a state of wakeful dreaming? I don’t know how restful it is though. I’ve been fighting with my girlfriend and I haven’t really slept in a few weeks. It’s weird being in my bed alone. I have a memory foam mattress and her shape is still there, even when she isn’t. Sometimes I fall into it when I roll over. Like she’s laid a trap out right beside me. Then I start wondering why she’s not there or if she ever was and I can’t sleep. Like I forget how. I guess that’s why people keep their memories on Grid and flip their mattresses, but mine’s really heavy. I’d kind of need some help. I should’ve asked Stan. Sometimes I’ll wake up in my pod and the screen will still be on and I’ll think—”
“What are you doing here, Anton?” I said.
“Exactly! That’s exactly right! I’ll think, What are you doing here, Anton?” he said, blinking into his coffee. “You should be out living your life. But then I’ll remember Mirror Mirror and think, Well, what is real life? Is it what we’re doing or what we’re thinking or what we remember? And what is that anyway, remember? We simulate on Grid, everyone does, but does that make it real if we’re all doing it together? What if you’re off Grid like Mirror Mirror? Then the Queen of Pentacles told me to come see you and I said—”
“Who’s the Queen of Pentacles?” I said.
“Exactly! That’s exactly right!” he said, still blinking. “I said, Who’s the Queen of Pentacles? But it was Mirror Mirror talking, that’s what she called herself. Or what I called her. I can’t be sure sometimes, when it gets going, if it’s what I’m thinking or if she’s telling me. She does that sometimes. You know?”
I took a drink.
“But it was smart of Mirror Mirror, using pentacles like that. That’s a good way to explain it to me,” Anton said. “Because they’re not just pentagrams, even though they are. But not in t
he Satanic way everyone thinks about them. Pythagoras had a lot of theories about them, and philosophers ever since have studied their properties too. They’re a kind of magic, in a way, even though we don’t call it that anymore. Sleight of hand is better, which is what Mirror Mirror’s doing, the way she goes recursive sometimes. When I try to reconfigure the code, anytime I even look at it, she reverts back. I thought Stan was doing it, and he thought it was me, but it’s almost like she’s writing herself.”
“What do you mean she’s writing herself?” I said.
“I don’t understand it either. Maybe I just need some sleep. I could be hallucinating the whole thing, I don’t know,” he said. “But maybe we’re all hallucinating, or somebody’s hallucinating us. The simulations keep getting better, the scaling improves, but they’re not this good yet, are they? Do you ever wonder why it never stops raining? I keep asking her, but she won’t tell me. I thought she had to, since we created her, but now I’m not so sure we did anymore.”
“Why did she send you here, Anton?” I said.
“Who?” he said.
“Mirror Mirror,” I said. “The Queen of Pentacles. Whatever you call it.”
“She told me to tell you, if you were ever in a spot and you needed help—”
“Who’s the fairest of them all,” I said. “I’ve got it.”
“That wasn’t it though,” Anton said, taking another drink. “She wants you to go see him.”
“Who?” I said.
“Mirabilis Orsted,” he said, unscrolling the name in the air with his jittery hands.
I looked at him.
“You’ve never heard of Mirabilis Orsted?” he said. “The groundbreaking seismologist? His work on the magnetic properties of earthquakes redefined the field. Just from a predictive standpoint he’s light-years ahead of anyone else. He extended his research on magnetism into all different kinds of disciplines—topology, numerology, cosmology—and then he went rogue. He quit his post at Caltech and moved to Los Angeles, nobody knew where really. He’s completely off Grid. But the Queen of Pentacles tracked him down. She wouldn’t tell me why. I kept asking her and she’d just say Anton, and then I’d say Sorry even though I wasn’t. It’s like she has me conditioned even though I’m supposed to be in charge, sort of. At least I thought I was. I don’t know, am I?”
