Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  8

  Jerry Caldwell is a sensitive creative trapped in an ancestral line of Money that won resources through ceaseless drive, common sense, frugality, heightened aggression, and a lack of imagination. It’s not that they didn’t respect imagination. In fact, they recognized it as a key element of success, but one that could be hired. You didn’t put imagination at the controls. So even though Jerry did everything right—went to the best schools, got the right degrees, and took the right positions in the company—the scepter was never going to be passed to her. She liked to paint and had an interest in quantum physics. Though her father deeply loved and admired her, he figured you didn’t put a daydreaming dauber, a person who thinks this world might not be the only real one, in charge of a multibillion-dollar corporation. When Akira hired Jerry away from her father while rejecting his offer to help save the world, the old man took it badly. He finally understood imagination was helpful when it came to seeing a double left hook heading your way.

  I step into Jerry’s. Drapes, fixtures, sofas, and counters. Her colors of the week are black and rose gold. Pictures and paintings hang on the walls. Most are priceless, and some may be personal, but it’s impossible to determine which are which, because the personal are hidden among a patch of obscure masterpieces. There’s one that I have always suspected is personal, one in an alcove of a group of little girls playing next to a giant tree. They all look like they’re having fun except one in a yellowish-beige sweater who has her back turned. Of course, the sweater is really red. I just can’t see it. As I walk past the painting now, I wonder why I’ve always been convinced it’s personal. Maybe because I know a bit about art and would have recognized it otherwise. Or because there’s no signature on the piece. My first reaction to it has always been to wonder what the girl in the red sweater’s face looks like, what she’s thinking while all the other kids are having fun. I asked Jerry about it once, and she told me that if I can’t tell the difference between a random painting and a masterpiece, maybe the random painting is a masterpiece waiting to be recognized. I wonder if that little girl in the red sweater is waiting for the same thing.

  In the center of the room, I see that Jerry’s still working on the same art project, the one that ponders what it is that makes someone or something iconic. She’s been at this thing for at least seven years now. Nobody really likes art that stays still anymore, so it’s a digital sculpture that morphs from one three-dimensional icon to another, Marilyn Monroe to Super Mario to Benjamin Franklin flying a kite to the Trojan horse. It’s art that asks why so few are remembered and so many are forgotten. Finally, the sculpture morphs from Pearl of Lao Tzu to the original Ascalon, its mighty point soaring near light speed toward Sessho-seki, the asteroid the weapon’s strange attractor.

  Jerry steps in the room, looking stunningly iconic herself. A hater of foam fit, of any clothing, really, that’s practical or doesn’t stand out, Jerry dresses every night like she’s going to her 150-atmosphere-deep digi opera box seats. Right now, just like her furniture, she’s in black and rose gold. She’s got the kind of beauty that stirs not lust, but awe. She’s holding two lowballs and hands me one. She stands next to me and we watch her sculpture. Now it’s Houdini wrapped in chains, then King Tut’s tomb. “You know King Tut was only nine when he died?” Jerry says. “He didn’t do anything of real significance. It’s the look that makes him iconic.”

  I nod. King Arthur is pulling Excalibur out of the stone. This is a new one I haven’t seen yet. Part of the reason this is taking her so long to complete is that it’s endless—she’s constantly adding and taking away iconic images. Two years ago, there was music. Now, there’s none. Ying and yang appear, one of the only mainstays I’ve seen since the beginning of the project.

  “I told Sabrina you were here,” Jerry says. “You’re an awful husband.”

  “I know,” I say. “No Akira in your sculpture?”

  “I don’t think they’ll remember her,” Jerry says. “Just Ascalon.”

  We clink glasses without looking at each other. “They remember Einstein,” I say. We both sip.

  “But not Planck. They remember Einstein because of the crazy white hair. Besides, what’s your daughter’s name again?”

  Good point. “You always hated her.”

  “Not always,” she says.

  “For the most part.”

  “She was such a bitch.”

  I turn to Jerry.

  “What?” she says. “We should talk ill of people after they’re dead. That’s when it doesn’t matter.”

  I sip. “I know better than to get into an argument with a lawyer.”

  She eyes me, toe to hair. “You look awful. Did you stop going to the clinic?”

  I think about Akira and her AMP chamber. The sight of her parts sliding onto the floor. It’ll be a while before I can go to the clinic and lie in a chamber again. “At a certain point, there are too many appointments just to look good, feel okay, and stay alive.”

  Jerry laughs. “What else is there?”

  “Nothing, I guess.”

  “You sound like a depressed teenager going through existential crisis,” she says.

  “That’s hitting below the belt,” I say. “I saw one earlier. A teen. Blue with a tail.”

  She’s about to say something but stops herself. She takes my glass and heads to the bar. “Thanks for letting me stay here,” I say.

  “As long as you like. On the condition that you ping Sabrina tomorrow.”

  “Deal.”

  “Her, I always liked,” Jerry says as she fills the glasses. “I know what it is to want something your entire youth, to kill yourself for it, then have it taken from you. It’s excruciating. I know what it feels like not to be wanted. You know what your problem is?”

  Jerry often starts conversations with that question. I’ve learned to not take it personally. It’s actually her trying to be nice. “Which one?” I say.

  Jerry smiles and steps to me with the refills. “Never in your life have you failed spectacularly. So you keep doing the same shit over and over again.”

  I take my glass. I’ve certainly failed spectacularly. Past wives and children count. And I failed Akira today. But I don’t mention that, and we cheers. “I’ll drink to that,” I say.

  We both drain our lowballs. “Whiskey and war,” Jerry says, “will never go out of style.”

  “There hasn’t been a war since Sessho-seki,” I say.

  “There’s always war. Sometimes it’s just invisible.”

  Jerry takes my glass and motions toward the guest bedroom. My eyes scan the room before I exit: walls, flooring, furniture, just about everything printed from recycled plastic skimmed from the ocean. Polymers that can change color for the right price. Jerry makes good use of that, redoing the scheme of the place every week. Sometimes, she just throws it all out and starts again. What she throws out will be made into something new for someone else. Is that our new loop? Or the reworking of an existing one?

  We stop at the door. It’s been a gazillion years since we slept in the same room together. Just a tryst or two between marriages. Maybe the only two good things about getting older is the waning of want and no fear of loneliness. Regardless, we never speak of it. “You didn’t see how she went,” I say.

  “They aren’t reporting it,” Jerry says. “It must’ve been gruesome.”

  She doesn’t ask for details, and I don’t wanna talk about it anyway, so I just thank Jerry and tell her I’ll make this up to her. She tells me I should let it go. That she doesn’t get what I’m doing, going so far off the book, quitting my job, leaving my wife and kid for the night, and ending up here with plans to look further into a case I was going to get pushed off anyway. Not even the chief will be able to keep his paws on this one. It’ll become Federal. International, if it isn’t already. The death of Akira Kimura is a global incident. And with that c
ollective manpower, that brainpower, they’ll solve it. Certainly faster than one old man who can’t look at the situation objectively anyway.

  “Why even do this? It doesn’t make sense. If you’re hell-bent on leaving your job and a domestic life, then fine. Collect your early retirement, become an expat somewhere, and eat and drink and whore yourself to death like your standard repugnant Less Than. If you think there’s no meaning, just a lifetime of wasted effort, then go and do that. Because if you think that and you keep doing what you do, you’re dragging down two other people with you, and I have no respect for that. It’s weak.”

  Quite a speech from Jerry. Some of the finer points I’ve already forgotten, but it’s done its job, because two hours later, I’m still wide awake in bed.

  I’m mulling over Jerry’s words while the song from the piano at Akira’s Telescope plays on repeat on my iE. I’m sweating bullets, probably withdrawal from all the pills I didn’t take over the course of the day. The song is what I imagine extraterrestrial music sounds like—too fast. There are patterns, but I can’t parse them.

  Jerry’s right. Pack it in. The island is probably already crawling with every super-sleuth in the world. I make a deal with myself: after I check out just one more thing, I’ll stop. While literally the entire police world sifts through Ascalon Lees, every smudge of forensic evidence on anything Akira has ever touched, I’m going to dig up only a single grave tomorrow, marked by a gravestone etched with katakana in the middle of the obsidian cobalt fields on the eastern tip of the island. And if nothing comes of it, I’ll start carving out the tombstone of my fourth marriage and move so far away from here that it will be impossible to be tortured by any greens or reds.

  As I toss and turn, soiling Jerry’s high-thread-count silk sheets with sweat to the tune of Akira’s song over and over in my head, I’m thinking that this is so hard, this thing I have to do tomorrow. But that’s a lie. The hard thing to do would be to walk away from Akira’s death. To patch things up with my wife, with the chief, and go back to normal. What I’m doing right now, including my adrenaline-fueled late-night planning, is the easy thing, practically a compulsion. Which means it’s probably not the right thing. All my life, all I’ve ever done was the easy thing. And maybe, as crazy as it sounds considering her vast accomplishments, that’s what Akira always did, too. Is that why Jerry hates her? But there’s no way you can go through life, especially taking the easy route, without pissing some people off.

  I tell myself for the hundredth time that I should take my pills. I turn down the music and grab the bottle. I imagine little Ascalon smiling and walking backward to her potty. It’s adorable. It’s one of her great joys, navigating by memory through what may trip her up from behind. I miss my daughter.

  Then I stop.

  Backward.

  I put down the bottle of pills. Backward. What did I tell the chief when I quit? Akira had to see first where Sessho-seki had been before she knew where it was going. Backward. I call up the song again. I tell my iE to play it from end to beginning, slowly this time.

  And that’s when I hear them. Notes I can understand. Red strands that flutter above me, morphing into letters. Lyrics, sung in red:

  Ascalon is not only the name of the savior

  It’s the name of the daughter

  The one I gave up

  Find her for me and tell her that I’m sorry

  I am overwhelmed. It’s so clear now, a red so bright I’ve never seen it before. Laces of notes and words dance together above me. I want a piano so I can play it. So I can feel it etched into my bones. I want to be a part of it. But I resist the feelings it stirs in me and concentrate on the story it’s trying to tell me. And it’s simple.

  Akira had a daughter I didn’t know about. That the world never knew about.

  No, this has got to be bullshit. Pure hallucination driven by paranoia. But the greens and reds have never done me wrong. Is it guilt, emitting a hormonal scent that I perceive with sight? Does struggle before death emit a chemical in wafts of green? I’m not supposed to be able to see these colors, but no matter what, they are right.

  So I start to speculate. She must’ve had the baby during college, in the years no one knows about, a girl that perhaps instead of aborting, she gave up for adoption. And maybe when she became the most powerful person in the world, she had records of this child expunged. This little girl might not have known she was the child of Akira Kimura. Or maybe she did. Maybe, out of guilt, Akira told her. This child, who would no longer be a child now, could have killed Akira out of resentment. Rage at being denied rightful hereditary fame and fortune and a savior’s name. It takes the highest level of rage to cut someone into pieces in that particular fashion—with methodical laser precision, beyond the laws of biology and sanity. If I’d been this baby, would I want to cut Akira to pieces, too? She was known to be heartless, and who knew what a spurned daughter with half her genes could accomplish. Would Akira have granted her access to her penthouse at the bottom of the ocean? Her name really could be Ascalon Lee.

  Or maybe that child was an innocent, out there now in need of help. She might be the only living trace Akira left behind. Or maybe I’m losing it, and she doesn’t even exist. There are so many possible narratives. I think of Jerry’s notions of infinite realities, and I wonder if one day we’ll discover that storytellers are actually mystics with the ability to glimpse the alternate realities around us. And when I think of all the variations on this story, the story of Ascalon, I cannot imagine a single one that ends happily. Because I see in red and hear death in the song. This child was killed.

  I surprise myself by starting to cry, burying my face in the smooth sheets so Jerry doesn’t hear me from the next room over. I cry for my father, bent to the point that he couldn’t be straightened out. For the first wife and child, who left me. For the dead ones, buried deep beneath the sea. I cry myself atmospheres deep, until I can drown out the terrible song. I cry for Akira, for her daughter, the first Ascalon. I cry until I’m all cried out, until I finally reduce my sorrow to a sheet stain that will fade and vanish. I need to get it all out now, because I’ll need to listen to the song again and again without this cloud of tears in order to grasp the clues I’m sure exist in it. I will honor Akira’s last wish. I will find her daughter, if she has one, and tell her that her mother is sorry.

  I catch my breath, slip into my foam fit, and change it from blue to black. I strap on my holsters and pockets and slip into my steel-toed tabis. The smart pleather constricts my ankles. I head to Jerry’s bedroom to shout a quick thank-you before I leave. I want to explain the song, but like everything else, it sounds too crazy. They’d have me committed, maybe even reevaluate every case I’ve worked in my career. And not for a second will they believe me.

  That’s when I see green wisps, like breath, pulsing at the base of Jerry’s closed door. I stop in my tracks, my heartbeat quickening. Is Jerry okay? I pull out my knife.

  I burst through the door and step in. Jerry sits up. “What the hell?” Her eyes are locked on the knife in my hand.

  I look back at the door. The green tendrils curl and vape past me toward Jerry, who’s looking at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Put that away,” she says.

  “You’ve known her for years,” I say. “You went to school with her. What do you know?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Have you lost your mind? Put the knife away!”

  I step to her bedside. I find my hand curled around her throat. My hand—or her neck—glows green. I can’t tell which. I don’t squeeze. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Akira’s death has driven you off the deep end,” Jerry says. “You need to stop.”

  “You know something,” I say. “Tell me.”

  “I’ve never been anything but a friend to you,” she says. “An honest one. Look in the other direction for the person who lied to you.” She rips my hand from
her throat and stands up. She slaps me. Hard. “She told me once she would get you to kill me.”

  I shake my head. “She would never ask that. And I would never do that.”

  “And yet, here you are, one hand on a knife and the other on my throat. This wouldn’t be the first time you killed for her, would it?” Jerry asks.

  “I was doing my job. I was protecting her.”

  “Was it protection?” she whispers.

  “Yes. Every single time. Now tell me about her daughter.”

  She pauses, stunned. Then she turns and grabs a black shawl on her nightstand, draping it around her shoulders. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “Now get out.”

  I glance at her iE, staring down at me.

  “I haven’t sent that footage yet, but I will,” Jerry says.

  I head to the door. “You idiot,” she says. “All those years, she was just using you like she used everybody else. She isn’t who you think.”

  I turn back around. “She saved me. I wanted the fucking world to end, and she picked me up and saved me.”

  Jerry smirks. “You’ll never see it, will you? She didn’t save anyone. She just made you feel alive again.”

  I want to turn back, walk over, and bury my fist in her esophagus, but the green is gone, and I know the intent is no longer there. I storm out. There’s just the red song now leading me through the hallway and to the front door.

  The one I gave up. Find her and tell her I’m sorry.

  With every step, I know how crazy I might be. The idea that I, and I alone, am the only person who can hear, smell, see a thing. A psychic. An astrologer. A ghost hunter. What people probably don’t get or wouldn’t buy is that I want to be wrong. I always want to be wrong. I don’t want all my senses tied up with death and murder. We all just want to see enough so we don’t stumble. People who see more than that end up unhappy. I don’t believe in ectoplasm, Santa Claus, reincarnation, or chi. But I see what I see. And I believe one thing: so far, the only thing we have proven absolutely correct is that only the unknown lasts forever. This means that no one, including me, has it all figured out, but also that my ability, even though it’s unexplainable, is possible.