Warnings from the Future

by Ethan Chatagnier

  “Isn’t that an Italian name?”

  “Holoman,” Gino says. “Isn’t that kind of mayonnaise?”

  Whit’s always been able to feel it when he blushes: a girlish warmth that hits the neck as much as the cheeks. He smirks through it. It was a good line. Whit wants to show the kid he can laugh at himself without giving away authority, that he’s not one of the brutes who’ll slam Gino’s head into a wall for a stray word. Someday Whit will need honest information, and this decency, this showing of humanity, will pay dividends. Though if his test prep course is worth its ridiculous sticker price, he might not be around to see it. But that damn blush—it flushes any authority down the toilet.

  “You know how it works,” he tells Gino. The kid puts his hands against the wall. Whit pats him down: his ribs, his back, his moist armpits, the back and front of his belt, where they like to keep their guns, though corner kids get frisked enough they usually know better. His ankles, calves, knees, thighs. Whit pats the outsides of his oversize pockets. It can be hard to feel anything but pills in there—he’s missed things before, been razzed for it by the most asinine of street cops—so he reaches into Gino’s pockets to check for powders, weed, money, scraps of paper with phone numbers penciled on them. There’s nothing, as he expected. The stash will be hidden nearby. But he has to check, they say: if you don’t catch the dumb ones you won’t catch any. He brushes something soft through the fabric of the pocket, and his hand startles back.

  “Buy me a drink first?” Gino says.

  “A real comedian,” he says. He digs an elbow into the kid’s back, the way he remembers his own older brother doing when he pinned Whit down as a kid, an unbearable pressure against the ribs. But since there’s plenty of space between Gino and the wall, there’s too much give to cause him any discomfort.

  “Shiatsu,” he says. “Hot stone.”

  “Go home,” Whit tells him. Whatever lookout he might have has scooted off. “What kind of mother lets her kid out at this hour?” The kid does a little dance, snapping his fingers above his shoulders at Whit. Then he does a twirl and slides off.

  Vargas chuckles as Whit climbs back into the cab, and Whit goes hot in the neck again. Vargas says he’ll tell the boys Whit tried. “But off the record,” he says, “you’ll never outclown a kid with no bank account. What they lack in material assets they make up in cheap irony. You can’t smooth talk them, kid. They only love the boot.” He sees the look Whit gives him, and offers back a mockery of his piety. “It’s not racist. I came up around here.”

  Aimless driving. They take a call for a toddler having febrile seizures, and stand around in the wet night air while the paramedics do their thing. A noise complaint: lovers’ quarrel, a woman in a bathrobe holding a cheese grater like it’s a deadly weapon. No B&E from dispatch, though, no gunshots lodging in the studs of apartment walls, no carjackings. At 1:13 a.m. a howl comes in not from dispatch but from another black-and-white: responding to apparent burglary at Weston and Campbell, broken storefront glass, young black male seen nearby with a suspicious backpack. It doesn’t make sense: that intersection is just a bail bondsman and an electronics repair shop; why rob a place where everything is broken? At 1:18 another call comes through with a little more octane on it: shots fired at Campbell and Booth, officers unharmed, suspect down. Whit’s stomach lurches. And Vargas has that slow way about him, and his mouth half hidden by that baby-shit mustache, and Whit can’t tell at all what that expression means. Regret, amusement, resignation, righteousness? Is it giving him too much credit to say he sighs when he responds?

  “Well,” he says, unreadable. “That’s one.”

  Whit had thought it was all bluster and bluff. How could it be otherwise? That thought: this can’t be the world. As though Vargas can see the kind of spiral Whit is headed down—forehead against the cold window, mouth gone mute—he pulls into a Denny’s parking lot and tells Whit he has no choice about getting a cup of coffee. Whit goes along. He wants off the street. The counter waitress is Joan, but just the N on her nametag has turned sideways so it reads JOAZ. This is all Vargas calls her, flirting in a way she clearly wants nothing to do with. He pours so much cream and sugar into his coffee it’s like he’s trying to make another cup of pudding.

  “You’ve got to keep your imagination in the right place,” he says. “Whalen’s fiancée curled sideways on the least comfortable of ICU recliners while all those monitors beep away like fucking R2-D2. Waking up to see his face interrupted by a ventilator tube. Nguyen’s wife. Think of her awake right now, middle of the night, knowing that tomorrow she’s going to get a dozen visits from people she can barely understand. A guy like Nguyen probably had thirteen kids that all live off the rice noodles his paycheck afforded. Tomorrow her house is going to look like a florist’s wet dream, but she’s only going to be able to think about the dwindling sack of rice in the pantry.”

  “Mercy,” Whit says. Vargas clearly doesn’t know what he means, and neither does Whit, but Vargas stops.

  “Tell me about this test, then. You have to know all the laws?”

  “That’s the bar. This is just a test of logic.” Whit tells him about the three sections: reading comprehension, logical reasoning, logic games. The games are the hardest, at least at first—full of weird scenarios governed by weird rules. Six students are each going to see one of four movies. Three canoes with four seats each, and each canoe needs one adult and three children. Who is the best tennis player? If G plays golf, he’s the worst tennis player, but if he doesn’t, he’s the third best. But it’s the most learnable section—at least that’s what his teacher, barely more than a kid in fancy threads and glasses, promises every class. So far, yes, the games make more sense if he spends an hour on one, but when he tries to get through four in the thirty-five minutes the test gives him, it’s like trying to read computer code. That’s not what he tells Vargas. He tells him there are four game types, and each one has its own sketch. He explains, as best he can, how to form the contrapositive to a conditional statement. He finds himself cribbing words from his instructor’s lectures pretty much verbatim, but he sounds confident. It occurs to him that this is what Vargas was going for: getting his brain into a sphere where it’s more comfortable. He doesn’t mind the manipulation. He keeps going even when Vargas’s eyes glaze over.

  The radio vibrates on the counter next Vargas’s side of bacon, calling out something about a suspicious young black ma—Vargas turns the dial off, signs the check with To Joaz my one true love and his phone number, and motions Whit back to the car. He turns the radio back on when the doors are safely shut and locked, but there’s no chatter, nothing to indicate the count has gotten any closer to its terminus, and Whit discovers something about himself: he wanted the awful thing to be over so much that a part of him had wished for it to happen.

  He wants so badly to throw up that he rolls the window down and sticks his head out, but what’s in his stomach won’t fit through his throat. They’re farther south now, and farther inland. The air has lost its mossy smell. Now it’s just the day’s exhaust. Looking out through the blank night air he sees scattered big luxurious windows of the hillside houses lit up from the inside, insomniacs with their cable televisions on. They don’t need to worry about rising sea levels up there, but Whit remembers—he was a kid, but he remembers—when the whole range lit up like a quick-burning log in 1991, and three thousand houses dissolved into crackling black paper.

  Cops up there give warnings if champagne parties go too loud too late. Cops up there make sure no one up there is from down here.

  The dead streets quiver with a useless electricity. There’s no squeal of street-racing tires, no thumping of steroidal subwoofers, no rattle of shopping cart casters or calls of birds or even the grapey hiccupping of crickets. Engine noise and an open window. Vargas never runs the radio, neither music nor talk, and the squad radio has gone so quiet Whit imagines some sort of dread cloud hanging over the city soaking up all transmissions. He feels a
lone in the world.

  Vargas rolls up Whit’s window from his armrest, and its cool slate catches the skin of his forehead and lifts it upward. Vargas’s posture is stiff as a startled deer’s, and he’s looking past Whit, out the passenger window down Fremont, and Whit follows the tether of his gaze to the crew of seven marching down the middle of the street, and there’s no word for it but marching. This is a mission, not a stroll. They are headed south toward norteño territory. Something bad is going to happen. Vargas coasts to a stop. Thirty seconds later Whit’s watching them through the windshield, twenty feet in front of the bumper. They eye the squad car skeptically but keep moving. Whit waits for Vargas’s hand to go to the PA.

  “Don’t get crazy,” Vargas says. “I’m not putting money on a twoon-seven game of basketball.”

  “This is our job,” Whit says.

  “They do our job for us.”

  “Kids get killed in their beds. Stray bullets.”

  “Anecdotal.”

  Whit wants to spit in his face. Vargas’s eyes narrow. He asks: “Has anyone ever told you that when you get pissy, your mouth looks like a butthole?” He puts the car back in gear, and they creep north, opposite from where the crew was headed. Driving back that way, back in the direction of downtown, of the bridge, of the ghost silhouette of a more civilized city, he no longer feels alone in the world. He feels crowded in the car. His hands itch. His face itches. He tries to check his imagination, as his partner has recommended. He sees Mrs. Nguyen in front of a casket. He sees Whalen’s fiancée, and Whalen sedated and intubated on the table, breathing that robot breath, the rise and fall of his ribs too perfect, too regular. He can’t help but see as well the possibility of a line going flat and half a dozen nurses rushing into the room and setting to work with a defibrillator. He can’t help but see that possibility of them shocking only dead flesh that bounces, rubbery, but won’t come back. The possibility that with two dead cops, the law of threes will demand six.

  Ten minutes later, the radio crackles. A gunfight between gangs, not far south of where they just were, broke up on its own with no casualties. Vargas smirks. One of his great amusements is how gangbangers who love to pose tough with their guns have no idea how to aim them. But the smirk disappears into teeth as he chews his bottom lip. Perhaps he’s remembered that the 11th Street Boys who gunned down Whalen and Nguyen figured it out well enough. Dispatch wants a car to respond and set up a crime scene. Vargas calls in cross streets four miles north of their actual location and asks if they want him to head down. They decline. Closer cars, they say.

  He finally reaches a half-decent neighborhood and parks under the lights of a twenty-four-hour grocery. “We should while away some time,” he says. “Get in a better headspace.” He does this on nights when he doesn’t want to get mixed up in anything that might result in paperwork. He calls it his special union break. Tonight, he’s got a story to tell. His wife went snooping through his oldest son’s closet this last weekend and found a stash that would have garnered their captain a press conference: a two-and-a-half-foot water bong, half an ounce of weed, ultra-sensitive condoms, and a travel-size shampoo bottle filled with olive oil—Whit will never guess what the olive oil was for, Vargas says, or maybe he will. Whit tunes him out. Vargas doesn’t remember telling him the exact same story in May.

  Whit closes his eyes and thinks: evidence, conclusion, assumption. Logical flaw. Parallel reasoning. Method of argument. The quietest times his mind has had in months have been during the practice tests he’s taken: perfect silence, the timer set for thirty-five minutes per section, with one question in front of him to be dispatched, and then the next. He wonders if they can spend the rest of the shift like this: camped out. Hiding out. If Vargas relaxes into a certain mood Whit might even be able to crack open the books.

  But of course that’s a dream. Just after 3:30 a.m., the radio sparks to life again.

  Is it possible to go crazy in the span of five hours? Whit’s mind keeps heating up until he thinks it will catch flame, then going blank and cold. He presses the button to roll down the window. Nothing happens. Vargas has the child lock on it. Whit tells him to roll down the window. Vargas tells him to calm down. “Roll down the fucking window,” Whit shouts. Vargas rolls it down halfway.

  After the last radio call, Vargas said he wanted to get a damn donut. His eyes have reddened, and the sacks under them are puffy. It’s wearing on him too, Whit thinks, but not enough to exculpate him. They’re headed back north on a main avenue, and it feels like coming out of the depths, like coming up from a dive, even as Whit’s mind tangles itself with red thread. He’s thought already about all the things he could do: call someone at the Tribune; go through the upper brass; document, document, document. These options all seem to have the weight of impossibility on them. But they don’t, he knows, and that doesn’t absolve him. They are all logistically simple. The impossibility is inside of himself.

  As they pass back through Zombieland every soul they see is haunted in Whit’s mind by an officer with his pistol to the back of his head, and none of them has the slightest idea. There are fewer out now, few for whom 4 a.m. isn’t either too early or too late. They see the same bum sleeping next to his Christmas tree on the sidewalk, his basset hound using his thigh as a pillow. A few early bread trucks are out, something that’s always seemed out of place here, a relic of a charming old New York or Chicago, rather than this stripped-down urban wasteland. The lumberyard is closed, but under the security lights it looks like a dinosaur graveyard, and Whit watches one tired security guard patrolling the aisles.

  “What’s that kid’s name?” Vargas asks. He’s keeping pace with a kid strolling on the right-hand sidewalk. Whit recognizes him.

  “Gino.”

  Vargas rolls Whit’s window the rest of the way down. “Go home, Gino,” he calls across Whit.

  Gino stops and smirks at them. “Who’s Gino?” he asks. “My name’s Melvin.”

  “Whatever the fuck your name is,” Vargas says, “you should go home.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I mean ma’am. I mean officer.”

  Vargas chuckles. If Whit knows him at all, he’s about to kneel on the kid’s back and cite him for something stupid and hard to dodge: urinating on a public building; graffiti; indecent exposure. Vargas is a turtle, but he can be a snapping turtle. But his voice shifts into a sincere register Whit hasn’t even heard him use to talk about his own kids.

  “Trust me, kid. You want to be at home tonight.”

  The kid is suspicious of his tone, but he shrugs and says he will, before starting up a slower stroll in the same direction. Vargas gets rolling again, and Whit watches the kid shrink away in his side mirror. Who cares? Donuts and coffee are only a few blocks away. Fuck the cliché. It’s two hours to sunrise, and Whit has been up since 5 p.m. yesterday. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

  Vargas makes a pudding of his coffee again. Whit puts in a hint of milk and about five grains of sugar. Vargas: a jelly donut and a maple bar. Whit: an apple fritter. Whit’s almost disappointed he won’t be around long enough to see Vargas develop the insulin routine he’s going to need in a few years. Whit’s been looking at schools nearby, and in a fifty-mile radius he’s got two reach schools, four safety schools, and a few in between, but he’s starting to see the virtue in distant kingdoms: Northwestern in foggy Chicago, Tulane in dirty New Orleans, Notre Dame tucked away in the corn.

  “The question I’m keeping myself sane with,” Vargas says, “is ‘does it matter?’ Does it affect the situation in Egypt or Hong Kong? Does it drop more people into poverty? Does it sadden the nation?”

  “Does it need to?”

  “If you zoom out a little, three isn’t that much.”

  “Jesus.”

  “From a cosmic perspective.”

  “Jesus fucking christ.”

  Whit sits in silence. But this logic is viral. He feels it wiggling like a worm in his brain. It’s not rare to see a hundred or more violent d
eaths a year. Three in a week barely registers as an outlier. It is true: no one will be upset but a few stray family members. A part of Whit’s mind is telescoping out like a rising shot in a film, showing him a broader scope of land outside of which this quake won’t even register. For just a moment he wants to pull out his gun and put two into Vargas’s chest as he sits on that cheap plastic bench licking jelly off his lower lip. Unwilled, he imagines himself doing it.

  Is it possible to go crazy in the span of five hours?

  Whit closes his eyes, and again, he sees himself doing it: stand, draw, bang, bang.

  He rises and bursts through the door of the donut shop into the bracing air. It takes him a moment to decipher what he sees: a statue five feet away from the open window of the squad car, letting loose an upward arc of urine through the open passenger window. Of course it’s no statue, though he stands remarkably still, with his hips arched forward like those cupids, and the stream has an impressive constancy. It’s Gino. It’s Melvin. Who knows what it says on his social security card?

  Never afterward does he remember covering the fifteen feet between the shop door and the parking lot. Never afterward does he remember the tackle. It all happens like those rare, glorious moments he used to have on the wrestling mat, when his body moved perfectly without the brain’s approval—and suddenly he’s there: Gino’s on his back, and Whit’s elbow presses into his cheek, pinning his head to the ground, and Whit’s gun is in his hand, the muzzle against Gino’s temple. He’ll always remember it as someone else, someone with a voice the twin of his own, saying: “You little shit. Don’t you know what tonight is?” What he will remember, always, is looking into Gino’s eyes, waiting for the fear, needing to see the fear, but seeing none. He will remember Gino staring up at him with empty, empty eyes, and the realization, like being born, that the kid knew exactly what tonight was. That he’d always known what tonight was. That he’d known his whole life.