Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  The elevator stops, and I step into the penthouse. The floor is blanketed with cubes of linoleum that curl at the corners. To the left is a tiny kitchen with cracked marble counters. The white concrete walls lead up to a ceiling spackled with a strange, crumbling plaster. I step past the kitchen and enter the living room. There’s a sofa that I think used to be white but is brown now. And a portrait. Even though it flickers, I recognized the face. Brum. It hangs from the wall across the sofa.

  Dead ahead, an old man in a wheelchair is parked out on a lanai draped in blinding green artificial grass. I head to him, passing drapes choked with cat hair. I look around. No sign of a cat. Under Brum’s portrait, there’s a suspended bed that monitors body functions while its occupant sleeps. I imagine it’s hard to sleep when you’re hooked up to one, waiting for the buzz that alerts you that it might be all over. I walk by another box on wheels, a death predictor, a gadget that estimates your chances of making it through the day. The chief’s reads seventy-five percent.

  I pause at the sliding glass door. There’s a plant growing through the cracks of concrete balcony. Specks of planter and wicker litter the artificial grass. Trumpet creeper, my iE tells me. I can’t tell where the red-flowered vines root from, possibly in this floor or one of the dead stories beneath us. The sun is setting, and the old man is staring at a giant tree below, watching hundreds of green birds come home to roost. I can’t see them too well, the birds. They flock into leaves just as green as they are. Wind blows, and the rustling leaves sound like rain. A primitive energy in me stirs at the sight of all this life. I slide the door open and step onto the balcony.

  Chief of Staff Chang looks up at me and smiles. The bags under his eyes look like wilted abalones. I doubt he remembers who I am. Do I even have an accurate picture of who I was back then? I remember him as fat. He would’ve been a young adult when all the chickens died, when corn syrup still nourished the country, and before an ounce of beef or pork cost as much as the same weight in gold. Now I see him and think, maybe he wasn’t fat. Maybe he was just a big guy. But he looks small now, hunched over in his wheelchair, which sits on actual rubber wheels. He points a crooked, arthritic finger down at the tree. “I sit here every morning. Every evening. And I can’t for the life of me figure out what the spatters of white on the leaves are. Paint? Pollution blown over from The Leachate?”

  I look down at his pleasantly demented grin and don’t have the heart to tell him the white spatters are bird shit. I don’t even know how I knew what they were so quickly. Maybe all I’ve ever really noticed in life is the shit. But I’m seeing other things now. Like how hubris can be contagious. The chief caught it from Brum, and I caught it from Akira. “I remember you,” Chief of Staff Chang says. “She said you’d come for me.”

  I take off my hood. “I’m not gonna kill you. I just wanna know.”

  The chief sneers. “Know what?”

  I kneel down beside him. He’s got a thick plaid sleeping bag draped across his lap, a plush cascade of reds and blacks that skirt the bottom of his wheelchair. “Was Brum right? Was there no asteroid?”

  “She was my wife.”

  The wind blows. The leaves rattle, and the Ferris wheel creaks. “I’m sorry,” I say.

  The chief looks at me. “We kept it a secret because it would’ve sent the wrong message.”

  I nod. “Political bias.”

  “I was biased,” the chief says. “She was my wife.”

  I stand back up and feel my weight in my knees. I look over the balcony. “Was she right?”

  “You know, as old as I am, I still have pretty good eyesight.”

  I stare out at the tree. “My eyes are shot.”

  “I believed her,” the chief says.

  Belief. This is a dead end. I squat down again, which is a mistake because my back and knees are killing me, and I question whether I’ll be able to get back up. I stare at the old man and think, maybe in the end, there’s just belief and nonbelief, and math has simply become our latest tool of rationalization, filled with trickery like any other language. A tool to win an argument. Otherwise, scientists would never disagree. Never argue. Never revise or downright flip their positions. I remember Akira once telling me about a book that came out right after Einstein figured out relativity. The book was called something like, 100 Scientists Explain Why Einstein Is Wrong. Maybe what even math can’t overcome is the human condition, which is, in its essence, the fact that nobody ever wants to be proven wrong. Including me.

  “All that time, we knew she was lying,” the chief says. “Well, at least my wife did. But we went about it all wrong. For some reason, we felt like the clock was ticking. It wasn’t. We could’ve been patient. We could’ve proven that Sessho-seki and the Ascalon Project were shams after the supposed asteroid was destroyed. But Karlin, she was so outraged that it was like she was racing that ray to destroy The Killing Rock. She kept badgering the president.”

  I look out at the giant tree again. The green birds circle and chirp, looking for their spot in the canopy. Ribbons of wood drip from the thick branches. The birds look like the dead one Ascalon was holding in the painting, but bigger. I imagine the chief sitting out here at every sunset thinking about what he’s lost—what I took from him. I know the pain that stays with you from this loss, and I’m ashamed of knowingly inflicting it on others just to keep a lie breathing. “Evidence?” I ask.

  The chief lifts his arm, grabs my shirt, and pulls me close, surprisingly strong for his age. His hand is shaking. “The full-body scans,” he whispers. “Don’t you remember?”

  I do. The pedestal and rings of blue light. “What about them?”

  “Karlin. She gave up on trying to disprove Akira with math. She knew she’d lost that battle. So she contacted the engineers that were contracted to build the damn machine in the first place. They gave her access, and she obsessed over Akira’s scans. Specifically, her brain. She took them to her neuroscience pals in DC.”

  “What she did was illegal,” I say. “That data was my jurisdiction, not hers.”

  Chang scoffs. “Like you even knew what you were looking at. That’s exactly why it was your jurisdiction.”

  I grit my teeth. “So what about these scans?”

  “The parts of Akira’s prefrontal cortex where lies are created were lit up like midnight on New Year’s. Every single day.”

  I shake my head. “That’s not conclusive. We don’t even use that tech in interrogation.”

  “You don’t use it because of civil liberties. Otherwise, you would.”

  I swallow. “So what happened?”

  “I told Karlin to sit on the scans. Like you said, she was working outside her jurisdiction. But she couldn’t help herself. She went to the president. He looked at the scans and told her, ‘What am I looking at? Blurry snapshots of Bigfoot? A UFO?’ Karlin told him brain imaging of Akira Kimura. And he snapped. He’d had enough. He told her he expected her resignation by week’s end. And that was when we headed to Water City. We were going to confront Akira with those scans and give her one last chance to admit that she was wrong before we went whistleblowing to Congress.”

  I sigh. “That was a bad move.”

  The chief nods. “Imagine the frustration of being the only one to know the truth.”

  I think about Akira. “Or the pleasure of it.”

  Chang grimly nods. “You ever been married to someone obsessed and on a mission?”

  I think of Kathy. “I have.”

  “Could you have stopped her?”

  No, I couldn’t. Just like Chang couldn’t stop Brum. Like Sabrina can’t stop me. The best of us support, even while we watch the wagon wheels crumble beneath us. “You still have the data? It’s not rock-hard evidence. In fact, it’s pretty slim, but do you still have it?”

  “Don’t you think I would’ve released it all those years back if I did? The data wa
s stripped from us. Classified. And when Karlin was killed, the White House confiscated her iE and buried it under another layer of top-secret. So the only arguments I had were my word and a vague recollection of science I didn’t even understand. I knew I had zero credibility, but I had to say something, even if it sounded like mad ranting.”

  “So the White House covered it up? They didn’t believe Akira?”

  “Don’t you see? At that point, politically, they had to believe her. The president went all in for her. Most people believed her. He couldn’t walk back the Ascalon Project, even if he wanted to. Akira Kimura became the most powerful person on the planet.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?” I ask.

  “Because you’re here asking. I’m guessing this is the end for me, and I want someone to know the truth. It gives a me sick satisfaction that it’s you. That self-loathing kick in yet?”

  He’s persuasive. I don’t wanna be convinced, but I can’t help it. Murders built on a lie. I look down at the artificial grass, which is littered with tiny fragments of chipped planter from when the plant outgrew its potted life. I wonder how long it took its roots to rip through the planter. Seeing roots so deeply embedded in the now cracked concrete, I wonder if one could remove the plant without bringing the whole balcony down. Nope. just like Akira’s lie, the plant has grown too big to amputate safely. This trip was a mistake. Ultimately, the only thing I’ve gotten out of it is a guilt that could pull me down like quicksand if I’m not careful.

  “I don’t know if I can go further with this,” I say. “You don’t have any evidence, and I’ve got even less. I’ve got a wife and kid to think about.”

  The chief sneers. “A coward in a line of many.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But in the end, history will judge her. And it doesn’t need my help.”

  “It’s been nearly forty years,” the chief says. “History has already failed us.”

  “Your wife wanted to be right so badly, it ruined her,” I say. “And you. And me. Maybe all of us.”

  “Truth will ruin a man,” says the chief.

  I look out at the birds. They’re settling in now, perched deep in the tree where they cannot be seen. They’re Australian, these green birds, and it makes me almost want to laugh, the sight of the beautiful, tropical pestilence here in the middle of Oklahoma, probably returning from picking at rubbish at The Great Leachate. Even the huge tree, a banyan, looks Asian or tropical, and here it is in Muskogee, population two, so far as I can tell. Back on the islands, we would have these things eradicated. Indigenous species only. But here in forgotten middle America, nature is just taking its violent course. This is how the world is made. I remove The Book of Ascalon from my coat and drop it in the chief’s lap. “As someone who hates Akira, you’ll find this an interesting read,” I say.

  The chief lifts it and squints. “What is this?”

  “She had twin girls. She murdered one. The other . . . Well, she’s become something else.”

  The chief looks up at me. “She’s a terrible human being.”

  I shrug. “We’re all terrible.”

  “You have a chance to be better,” he says. “Make this right.”

  “That book is handwritten,” I say. “Probably the only copy. Take care of it. I’ll have the Feds come and pick it up. But you might want to read it first.”

  I open the sliding glass door and enter. I head to the exit. The chief wheels after me. “You’re not going to do anything?” he asks.

  “You were the chief of staff, and you couldn’t do anything. It’s been forty years, and I’m a newly retired cop. What the hell do you think I can do for you?”

  Chang’s only response is a long stare with forty years’ worth of frustration.

  I think about the state of the world. Our tech, our ecology, our low crime rate, our lack of war. Anyone with enough crypto can go anywhere in the ocean. Those without can lose themselves in simulated worlds that speak to their tastes. Ancient Rome, feudal Japan, the American West—even post-apocalyptic settings have finally become sellable again this long after our close call. This ain’t a utopia, but it’s a better place than it would’ve been if Akira hadn’t painted the sky. We are bound by that scar, a constant reminder that we’re lucky to be alive. The world now is a better place than the one John briefly lived in. It’s the kind of world Kathy would have loved to have seen. My first wife and kid, Vanessa and Brianne, are probably living it up in the EU. No more terrorists, global warming, nukes. The water mafia in Pakistan, the sea cucumber mafia in South Africa, gone. The pandemic in Sudan contained and eradicated. High methane-producing livestock like cows and pigs stopped being mass farmed. Then the global chicken plague got us, unwillingly, on a better diet. No more feasting on bowls with near-extinct creatures. Now it’s all plant-based, sea-based. The ocean’s no longer choking on plastic, which Kathy would have celebrated. Gigantic cubes of trash rotate in an endless recycling queue. For a century, we were all melting glaciers at incredible velocity while kite-high on painkillers, shopping, gaming, scrolling through social media, and chasing celebrity that the earth began to slosh and wobble. And that’s stopped now. It’s a better world for Ascalon than it was for me.

  Sure, it’s not perfect. We Less Thans still live paycheck to paycheck. Like those seascrapers, the ceiling separating The Have Nots from The Money is constructed with shatterproof glass. Soon, it’ll be as hard as the crust of a small neutron star. Parents still fight about who’s contributing more by way of paying bills, housecleaning, and childrearing. Poor countries have still been abandoned in the global economy. There are pockets of abject poverty on every continent. On ours, The Great Leachate. Nobody’s sure what the numbers are, because no one reports on The Zeroes. Journalism became PRM—Public Relations Media—before I was born. The feed reports on plot-driven, angry affairs, personal and global, and new diseases on the rise, at least one per species. It never really asks how or why. It just asks, What’s next?, then speculates.

  And sure, we stopped global warming. In fact, Ascalon’s Scar struck us like Cupid’s arrow, charming us into our still-current love affair with the planet. But like the end of all wars, the carnage remains. The groundwater and penicillin rivers were deemed unfixable when they realized how much it would cost. On a personal level, medical bills are still flabbergastingly high for basic procedures. There are childcare costs. Mortgage costs. And other costs we don’t realize we’re paying until Death, the ultimate repo man, comes to reclaim our liquidated souls. We use our raised life expectancies just to work for longer. Extend our credit even further. We hide, show off, and protect everything behind sheets of gorilla glass. Plus, there are no more cigarettes or fried chicken.

  I wonder how much all the bullshit matters. Is thinking like a parent the same as thinking like a coward? The truth is, I’m scared. The last few days have shaken me. I turn and look the chief in the eye, to give him some respect with my final refusal. “She’s dead,” I say. “Why aren’t you satisfied with that?”

  He looks at me, puzzled. “She’s not dead.”

  I feel my face work itself into a frown. “What are you talking about?”

  “She was just here two days ago.”

  I start to walk away. I want nothing to do with this craziness. “She was down there, tinkering with the Ferris wheel. I figured she was either spying on me or here to kill me. I’ve been waiting for the day she’d come for decades. I tried to go down there. Even in this state, my rage took over. But by the time I got there, she was gone. I figured that’s why you showed up here today. She finally decided to punch my ticket.”

  “Impossible, buddy. I saw her cut to pieces myself.”

  “Look.” He projects a holo from his iE. It’s a glitchy, older model, but from a distance, the figure climbing the wheel and calling the green birds to her does look like a young Akira.

  Ascalon.

  Af
ter the name sounds in my head, I see a cloud of green smoke above the chief’s head. And I cannot move. Of course, my uninformed attempt to blot this ability out has utterly failed. The ophthalmologist has allowed me to see red and green with only my eyes. I figured, take away one gear, and the machine is supposed to break. I don’t register a smell, but I clearly see the green gyre widen above his sparsely haired crown. “No,” I say.

  “What are you looking at?” the chief asks. “Did you hear me?”

  I try to snap out of it. Both of our iEs drop to the floor, spark then sizzle. I step to the wheelchair to pull the chief inside. Then I hear music. I stop. The Ferris wheel groans to life. “Entry of the Gladiators” blares from it, and the hundreds of green birds, quiet during sunset, are roused by the music.

  The entire colony takes wing into a longitudinal lift high up and pitches back down to about thirty feet above us. They bank and begin to circle, flapping in unison and gliding around as if all thousand of them are tied to us by the same string. They are beautiful. Orange beaks, heads slightly yellow, bodies green, tails spears of blue. All from the same ancestors.

  Then, the string is snipped. They pitch up so high, their green feathers become shadow. They reach their ceiling and seem to stall. They hang up there for a moment, wings spread, completely still, like beautiful origami. Then the colony crumples, and the birds sink together, speeding straight at us.

  The squawking is awful as they pick apart the chief. His screams are even worse. He tries to swat them away with the book but drops it. I take out my blade and swing wildly at them, but there are too many. When he stops screaming, it occurs to me that they might come for me next. I grab The Book of Ascalon off the artificial turf, dive inside, and shut the sliding door. There’s not much left of the chief by the time the door is shut. The birds turn to me now and fly into the glass. So many of them that I can no longer see outside. The carnival music gets louder and louder. The tempered glass door begins to crack. I heat my blade, although I wouldn’t be able to fend that many of them off even with a flamethrower.