Aeota

by Paul Di Filippo

  A E O T A

  Paul Di Filippo

  For Deborah, my eternal mystery

  1. GLASS, BOX, CALENDAR, STARS

  THE UNEXPECTED TEXT READ:

  find aeota yesterday everywhere.

  I thought several thoughts, in this sequence:

  Okay, I find things. Can do.

  Who or what is “aeota?”

  Yesterday is gone.

  Or is it?

  Everywhere’s a big place.

  Or is it?

  And who knew this Methuselah of a phone of mine could display texts?

  I carried a Nokia 7650, thick and clunky as a box of animal crackers and now sixteen years old. I had purchased it new in 2002, partially thanks to the hype associating it with the film Minority Report. It seemed highly futuristic right out of the box, maintaining its sci-fi luster for a surprisingly short interval thereafter, as most such products do these days, and had immediately aided me in my work to some acceptable degree that compensated for carrying it burdensomely in pocket and learning to use it. But after being forced to take several unpleasant and/or unwanted calls at awkward moments, I came to resent its electronic tether, and was always on the indecisive point of throwing it away. I certainly from the outset knew that I had no intention of upgrading it, stepping onto the endless uphill treadmill of Next Great Gadget. I used it nowadays as I had always used it: to place and receive voice calls, and those mainly to my ex, Yulia. I also checked in with my message inbox when I was away from the office.

  Of course there was no longer any official support for the orphaned device. Only the ingenuity of my pal Marty Quartz kept the thing alive.

  I had never received or sent one single text in those fifteen years, so the appearance of this message was instantly startling.

  I noted immediately that the originating number was one of those generic fake strings of digits you see in films, all fives. Someone was spoofing me. So much for any possibility of sourcing the text.

  As I pondered the small color screen, about as big as two closed paper matchbooks abreast, the message disappeared, replaced by a question:

  PRINT TEXT Y/N?

  Could this sucker somehow have connected itself wirelessly to my office printer?

  I highlighted Y and jabbed the worn enter button between the left and right movement controls.

  From the top of the phone, out of a heretofore-invisible slot, a slip of paper the size of a Chinese cookie’s fortune began to emerge. It juddered out with a last jolt and wafted to the floor. I leaned forward half-out of my desk chair to retrieve it.

  On it were four symbols that I thought I might have identified positively as emojis, if I actually knew what emojis were:

  find aeota yesterday everywhere.

  When I looked at the top of the phone whence the slip had emerged, I could discern no opening. However the slip had emerged, the aperture had resealed. I popped the upper back where the SIM card went. No print mechanism met my inspection.

  I folded the tiny slip and tucked it into my pants pocket.

  I would have to ask Marty about this new capacity of my phone the next time I saw him. Maybe he had retrofitted the device with this new ability.

  I spun my chair around to use the keyboard of my desktop computer, which, while not quite as ancient as my phone, had stopped receiving automatic software updates about the time Isabella Rossellini had last been featured in a starring role.

  Searching “aeota” returned relatively few hits, just a score of pages, most of links leading to the type of seemingly machine-generated gibberish that apparently constituted half the internet, robot prose to be read by androids. The major sensible usage for the word was as an acronym for the American Essential Oils Trade Association. They had a Facebook page, but their main site seemed to be occupied by a squatter. Well, if they had needed to be found, I had found them sufficiently. I’d have to send them a bill.

  Mission accomplished, and time for a drink.

  I had acquired a taste for tequila, neat, working with another guy on a case involving an arboreal Latino fowl. I wasn’t a snob, though—the cheapest kind would do me just fine. Right now I was working on a liter of Old Sandstone brand, ten bucks a bottle, no tax.

  The harsh golden liquid thrummed down my throat like a death-metal mariachi band.

  Putting the bottle away, I thought about the latest—and currently singular—client employing the service of V.RUGGLES, INVESTIGATIONS.

  Juniper Holtzclaw had hired me to track down her missing husband, Holger Holtzclaw. Like some wannabe Bernie Madoff selling a cold-fusion device or perpetual motion machine, Holger had been running a penny-ante pyramid scheme among his friends, neighbors, and relatives, involving the supposed invention of a new ultra-efficient methane-recapture technology that would be sold to landfill operators around the globe. He called his corporation Eurybia Enterprises. Supposedly they would employ all “green technology,” so everyone loved it. In classic fashion, every new investor’s money had gone to keep earlier suckers quiet, with Holger skimming off a goodly percentage for himself. His ultimate in-pocket take had been about a quarter million—peanuts, really, as these things went. But not to the horde of angry chumps beating on Juniper Holtzclaw’s door 24/7, eager to reclaim their vanished IRAs or, failing that, to learn of Holger’s whereabouts and take their recompense out of his hide.

  Juniper swore she had known nothing of her husband’s chicanery, and I believed her. She had given me a photo of the man—tall, saturnine, neatly attired, handsome in a sleazy way—and a list of hisfavorite resorts in Vegas, Holger’s native Austria, and the Caribbean. I had taken these solid clues and, within a mere week, turned them into precisely nothing.

  I had run out of ideas, but figured maybe Juniper could supply some. If not, she was always good to look at anyhow, a petite blonde resembling a young Goldie Hawn. And I had picked up a lonely vibe from our first interview, as if she would not be averse to some solaceful canoodling.

  As if thinking lustfully of women had summoned another female in my life, Yulia’s name and number appeared on my Nokia’s antique screen, triggering my lone ringtone, a ghostly sound effect that combined an Yma Sumac banshee wail with some notes from a Theremin. I think Marty had crafted it just for me. It wasn’t the most soothing of sounds, but you never missed a call.

  “Vee Ruggles, Investigations. If you are looking for a missing alimony payment, you need to contact your bank. Those capitalist suckers are pure evil, and delight in delaying the processing of money faithfully deposited into your account by the man you once called Tigerpants.”

  “Vern, quit fooling around. I need to see you about something. Today, if possible.”

  Going to see Yulia always led me into some kind of absurd situation which, while not necessarily classifiable in hindsight as “awful,” always proved alarmingly and unpredictably uncomfortable, at best.

  “We can’t handle whatever it is by phone?”

  She sounded more than moderately stressed. “No. Swing by the house as soon as you can.”

  “All right. Is it okay if I bring my new girlfriend? I think she can get some time off from her Vogue modeling job.”

  Yulia snorted like a young colt, which, believe it or not, I had always found to be one of her endearing traits. And despite whatever was troubling her, she could still match me beat for beat.

  “Yeah, sure, bring her along. She can meet my new super-stud boyfriend, if Nascar extends the Charlotte Motor Speedway course to allow him to make a pit stop by my front door.”

  Yulia hung up and so did I. I stared at the Nokia for a full minute, but it didn’t play any more tricks on me.

  Dates with two hot women, both of whom surely would not be able to keep their hands off my burly, tequila-powered body. Who said I had n
othing to live for?

  2. ONE BOURBON, ONE SCOTCH, ONE SNEER

  On the drive out to Juniper’s luxurious digs, I developed a sudden thirst. Having left my bottle of Old Sandstone back in the safety of its accustomed desk drawer just in case my cleaning lady should need a nip, I was forced to detour to my favorite dive, A. O.’s Tea Room. The place had been around forever, and during Prohibition it had adopted the innocuous moniker it still sported, as a blind against snooping Feds alert for the shameful enjoyment of illicit hooch. Depression-era proprietor Arturo Olvidado had hung around till the 1980s, coming to resemble a Latino Grandpa Smurf. Over the soused years I had watched him lose about five inches in height and gain twice that in circumference. These days his son, A. O. Jr., himself no dewy youth, ran the place. In honor of his father, or out of sheer cheapness, he hadn’t changed the decor since about 1962. I found the midcentury modern ambiance helped one attain Mad Men levels of liquor consumption.

  Close to two in the afternoon, the lot outside the bar featured only three or four cars. I joined the ranks and went inside, passing under the dead busted neon sign that depicted a lady’s hand holding a teacup, pinky finger extended.

  Irascible Junior himself was tending the bar. Before my butt even contacted the stool, he had a boilermaker sitting on the stained wooden counter for me. I slammed it back gratefully.

  “You got today’s newspaper handy, Art?”

  “Sure, Vern. Here you go. Waste your day.”

  Our local rag, the Argonaut & Globe, reflected a merger of two venerable papers that had been forced to lean on each other like two wounded soldiers just to survive in this mean shameful age of sound bites and click bait. Even combined, their resources were a fraction of what they had been when I was a kid. But I was hoping that maybe some enterprising young Jimmy Olsen had solved the disappearance of Holger Holtzclaw for me, and I could read about it on the front page.

  But no such luck. The headlines contained only the usual mix of the inexplicable, the outrageous, and the drear. What an insane fucking world. More and more I felt like we were all racing in a driverless train right over the edge of the frigging immemorial Grand Canyon.

  I turned to the comics to alleviate my gloom. Maybe today would be the day Garfield had another out-of-body bardo experience.

  Something caught my eye in a strip I normally did not read: Dick Tracy. In the first panel, one of Tracy’s subordinates at police HQ said, “Hey, Dick, there’s someone here to see you from way back when.”

  “Who might that be?” asks Tracy.

  In the second panel the buddy says, “Otto Atone,” a typical Dick Tracy goofball name, and Tracy does a spit-take.

  In the third panel a mysterious figure is being ushered into Tracy’s presence, but his face is in shadows. In the fourth panel—

  But there was no last panel. The paper had gotten sodden and been torn off by rough handling.

  The name “Otto Atone” struck me as weird somehow. I couldn’t figure out why, and after a minute I gave up trying. I got up to leave, and found my elbow grabbed without my implied or explicit consent.

  I gazed down to see a squat, shabby fellow who looked like the fellow from the cover of Tull’s Aqualung, if that guy had been living under a bridge for six months. It appeared his greasy moss-green coat had bonded to his frame from continuous wear. Instinctively, I pulled back from his touch.

  “You Ruggles?” His voice sounded like a kazoo being played through a wet sock full of mud.

  “Yeah. What of it?”

  “I got something for you.” He pulled aside his coat and took out a small white box that was amazingly clean, given its mode of conveyance. I flashed for a second on the box emoji that my phone had displayed. Did this package contain the enigmatic aeota?

  I didn’t immediately reach to take the box. “Who’s it from?”

  The guy sneered. “You got enemies?”

  “Well, not really. Except maybe my barber, as you can tell by my haircut.”

  “Funny man.” He thrust the box at me. “Here, take it! I got better things to do than wait on you. Anyhow, it’s not who it’s from—it’s what’s in it.”

  I accepted the box, which was about as big as a four-piece Whitman’s Sampler. The guy turned to shuffle off.

  “Wait a minute. What’s your name? How do I reach you if I need to?”

  “The name’s Baxter. Brevis Baxter. And don’t worry. We can reach you if we need to.”

  Baxter was gone before I could figure out how to reply.

  That left me with nothing to do but open the box.

  As soon as I removed the lid, which came away with a slight resistance and whoosh of escaping air, a not-unpleasant scent— like a day at the beach when the low tide had exposed many living things—poured out.

  Inside was something organic that resembled a tangle of moist seaweed shot through with gleams of opal, gray, and purple. I poked it with my finger, and it suddenly deliquesced into a sloppy slurry sloshing around thickly in the cardboard box.

  I put the lid back on and chucked the whole mess into the bin by the front door as I left.

  If this was a free trial for a bento box lunch service, I remained unimpressed.

  3. AEOTA AND AEOTA

  The maritime scent on my tainted finger remained pungent throughout the drive to the Holtzclaw place, diminishing only gradually by the time I arrived.

  Juniper Holtzclaw had held onto a very nice piece of property, despite all the ongoing litigation against her absent husband. About six-thousand square feet of mock-Tudor McMansion on a landscaped acre in a part of the city where trees outnumbered rats, good au pairs ranked barely higher than killer Pilates instructors, and trash pickup happened discreetly down hidden service alleys. I felt ashamed just parking my twenty-year-old Toyota beater at her curb. If I got lucky, nothing would fall off it while I was inside.

  Walking up to her front door, I suddenly wondered exactly when the appurtenances of my life had transitioned from modern to antiquated. Getting divorced hadn’t left me with lots of disposable income, true, but I could have afforded a new phone, for Christ’s sake. But I seemed to have cultivated to the point of obsession some bias against the new, some inertia to change, a begrudging attitude toward the present that was only getting more pronounced. Pretty soon, I figured, I would be living backwards, like Merlin or Benjamin Button.

  I thought of a Robert Mankoff cartoon I had seen in the New Yorker a couple of years ago. A patient lies on the psychiatrist’s couch, the skeptical shrink eying him suspiciously. The nutty guy says, “But I like living in the past. It’s where I grew up.”

  Juniper answered the door herself, albeit somewhat suspiciously, a fair stance given the random irate strangers stopping by at all hours. She had kept the house, but no servants. That was a big comedown.

  Clad in a cream-colored cowlneck sweater over flower-patterned pedal-pushers and a pair of those mock gladiator sandals that laced up her shapely calves, she looked like the missing quarter of a million bucks that Holger had fled with. She recognized me, of course, but did not seem overly enthusiastic at my arrival.

  “Mr. Ruggles. No news, I take it. What more can I do for you?”

  “Can I come inside, please? If I make one more convert for the Mother Church, they’ll give me a second wife.”

  That bought me a chuckle, and soon I was sitting on a dark leather couch in a sunny, over-decorated parlor half the size of Union Station. Offered a drink, I angled for tequila, but got only white wine, which was the equivalent of hoping for sex and instead getting a lecture on social justice. As for any hypothetical sex itself, it was “Outlook not so good,” according to the Magic 8-Ball placed midway between my gut and dick.

  “I don’t think I ever inquired. How did you and Holger meet?”

  “It was during a ski trip to Klosters in Switzerland during my junior year of college. Holger was there with some friends. Incredibly charming and accomplished on the slopes. We hit it off, and got married a ye
ar later.”

  “Holger’s been around the track a few more times than you.”

  “He is eleven years older than me, yes.”

  “And who brought more, uh, capital to the sacred union?”

  Juniper practically sprouted icicles. “I have a certain safe and sufficient income thanks to the generosity of my family. But Holger always sustained our mutual lifestyle in a very capable fashion. Right up to this unfortunate misstep.”

  Nothing could have been clearer to either Juniper or me: She had married a sexy Eurotrash scammer on the order of Clark Rockefeller and now was paying the price. I didn’t make her say it out loud, and I refrained from any moralistic finger-pointing of my own. My moralistic fingers were too dirty and out of practice to be of much use.

  “Did Holger have any offices for this cow-fart utilization thing he was putting over on people?”

  “No, he worked out of his study here.”

  “Is it possible for me to go through his papers?”

  “I suppose so—whatever the authorities left behind.”

  In contrast to the parlor, the study was dark and claustrophobia-inducing, with heavy velvet curtains, drawn, seeming to narrow the room to coffin size. A desk lamp with one of those useless energy-saving bulbs did little to dispel the gloom.

  “Leave everything as you find it, please, and then let yourself out. I have a headache and need to lie down.”

  I didn’t bother mentioning that this was the effect I had on all women.

  At the study door, Juniper paused, and I wondered if she was going to ask me to tuck her in.

  “And please don’t abscond with any of the more valuable curios, if you can help yourself. Everything is under a lien, until this mess gets straightened out.”

  “Gotcha. My interior decorator is very picky about what I bring home to add to her designs anyway.”