Point B (a teleportation love story)

by Drew Magary

  “Around here?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “Well, I work here all night so I usually save my big meal for afterward. It’s kinda like my breakfast, actually.”

  “Breakfast works for us,” Anna told him. “I mean, which meal is which anymore?”

  “Yeah, it’s all mixed up now, isn’t it? Anyway, my spot is a joint called Pho Hoa in Ho Chi Minh City. It’s incredible. I usually pop over there around 4pm Vietnam time.”

  “4pm?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thanks for the rec.”

  “No problem. You better get yourself an appetizer at the buffet before your friend houses them all.”

  Bamert came back as the bartender walked away. Another tray of champagne flutes glided by and Bamert grabbed two more.

  “We should endeavor to do this every Saturday,” he told her.

  “You told me this was a delicate waltz. You just attacked that buffet like you were a sperm whale.”

  “You are the guest, Anna Huff. You must be delicate. I, on the other hand, am here to serve as the artful diversion that I was born to be.” He stuffed two spring rolls into his mouth at once. “Now whatffs the planth?”

  “It’s already taken care of.”

  “Whuh?”

  “Just finish eating so we can get back to campus.”

  “We juffth got here!” Bamert double-fisted the new champagnes with urgency. “Relaxth! Take a load off!”

  Anna got up and walked over to the buffet. She took a tasteful portion of Korean fried chicken wings and fresh salmon belly rolls, then sat back down at the bar. The food was better than anything at Main Street, and yet she didn’t enjoy it all that much. She hated the club with a spiritual fervor. A set of double doors led out to an open roof deck, where a group of perfectly dressed twentysomethings gathered around at outdoor fireplace, sipping Moscow mules from copper mugs and laughing like they were in an ad for tooth-whitening strips.

  This place deserves a war. Burn it. Burn them all down. That hostess up front had Sarah’s old job, and yet couldn’t even summon the modicum of solidarity required to ask around about her. What a pile of shit that lady was.

  Anna drifted out to the patio and looked down at Broadway below. Two city buses were frozen in place on the sidewalk and had been converted, long ago, into ad hoc homeless shelters. To the East, tourists were porting in by the waterfront and then porting out again the instant they saw how many port scavengers and refugees had set up camp along The Embarcadero. Before MyClub took it over, the Battery Club got rid of all its formal entrance doors and swathed the first level of the building in a layer of reinforced steel, with a single loading dock the only way for people and goods to get inside from the ground. You could do that sort of thing when fire codes were no longer so burdensome.

  PortSys was also headquartered in San Francisco, over in a massive compound that occupied the entirety of what used to be The Presidio. The second PortSys employees clocked out of work on any given weekday, they would port far away from the compound and bunker down behind another portwall somewhere else. Every major business in this city, every fancy apartment building, every private club: all of them were cordoned off so thoroughly from the free zones, they may as well have been on another planet. David Farris was right: nobody acts on anything until it happens right in front of their faces, and they’ll go to great lengths to preserve that blindness. That was San Francisco now: a workday haven for the wealthy and the strategically indifferent. There was a lot of hate in the world, but it was the indifference that did the most damage.

  Anna looked over to the Bay Bridge. She and Bamert had come at just the right time to see its deck lights kick up and twinkle in the burgeoning dusk. Sunset chasers popped up along the Embarcadero below to catch a glimpse and shoot a port-by. A steady convoy of trucks were roaring back and forth along the bottom level of the bridge. The top level was now reserved exclusively for the United States Army and for PINE. It was very important that U.S. troops were visible to everyone: stationed in the most prominent spots, holding the nastiest possible weapons, constantly reminding you what they could do if you didn’t have an ID hanging from your neck.

  Anna fiddled with her passport card, which she dutifully hid under her sweater anytime she ported away from Druskin. It had a special watermark on both sides that glowed in the dark, so that PINE agents could see it on people. Of course, PINE agents saw only what they wanted to see.

  She gathered up a big loogie and hocked it over the railing. Then she slipped Vick’s pecan bulldog out of her pocket and took a photo of it in front of the Bay Bridge. Bamert stumbled out to the roof deck with another mountainous plate of food. He was drunk and bubbly.

  “Look at that view! A view like this, Anna Huff, is soaring. My heart feels brand new.”

  “I promised my mom I wouldn’t leave Druskin.”

  “I dare say that you haven’t held up your end of the bargain.”

  “I know. I suck. Duty called. I’m gonna go to Vietnam tomorrow morning, and I’m gonna talk to that bartender about Sarah, and then that’ll be it. I’m not gonna port out of school again.”

  “Why not? We’ve only just begun!”

  “Bamert, there’s a lot I want to do out there, and there’s a lot of people I wanna make uncomfortable. But I’m not ready. I’m gonna make this and Vietnam an exception, but after that, I have to concentrate on being an actual student.”

  “Okay. All right. It’s the wise thing to do.” He held up his PortPhone. “But I say we hold onto these jussssssst in case duty pays another call, hmmm?”

  HO CHI MINH CITY

  There was already a line at Pho Hoa when Anna and Bamert ported in the next day. The serpentine procession of foodie tourists heading out the door represented the only people standing in place around Phuong 8. The rest of the neighborhood was mass chaos, with locals porting in and out at will, sometimes just two blocks away from where they had originally stood. All the port winds blew harsh over Anna, knocking her into other pedestrians who appeared less than thrilled by the contact. She saw one customer port away from Pho Hoa while holding a hot bowl of soup in his hand, which was incredibly bold. The bowl didn’t even have a lid.

  The roads were alive: choked with vendors on motorbikes carrying crates filled with jackfruit and whole chickens and tiny fish to the thriving restaurants and markets. And of course, there were soldiers. You could port into Vietnam without a visa and without checking in at port customs. But the VPA was rightfully skeptical of Americans all the same. One of their men kept his rifle trained on Anna and Bamert as he roared by on a motorbike of his own. All around them was a hot funk of broth and gasoline and sweet milk flowers and rotting garbage.

  Through the front window of the noodle shop, a crowd of early diners sat on metal stools inside, hunched reverently over huge bowls of cinnamon- and anise-spiked beef broth. Anyone without a seat lapped at their bowls while staring angrily at the stool havers.

  Bamert was sweating through his suit. He took a hearty whiff of the air, like he wanted to inhale the whole sky.

  “You know that Druskin does a senior semester abroad in this country?” he told her. “I’m applying tomorrow.”

  Anna ignored him. She had spotted the MyClub bartender standing in the line, with a hat pulled down over his face. The bartender was sweating, although maybe that was just the heat.

  “Hey,” said Anna.

  “Listen,” the man said, keeping his voice low. “You cannot tell anyone you heard this from me.”

  “I won’t. I don’t even know your name.”

  “And you won’t. You wanna know about that girl, right?”

  “It’s my sister.”

  “Yeah well, I have to be far, far away from it,” he told her. “That fair?”

  “More than fair.”

  “And I would prefer you not go back to that MyClub branch ever again.”

  “What about me?” asked Bamert. “Can I go back?”

  “Who i
s that?” the bartender asked Anna.

  “He’s Bamert. Ignoring him is hard, but I promise that you can get the hang of it.”

  “Hey!”

  “We’ll never go back to that club,” Anna told the man. “You have my word.”

  “Double hey!”

  She hit Bamert with the laser eyes. “Bamert, not now.”

  He took a step back. “As you wish.”

  She turned back to her source. “I just wanna know what happened to my sister. That’s it.”

  The bartender swallowed hard and looked around. The three of them didn’t necessarily blend into the surrounding crowd, but the neighborhood was such a churning blender of humanity that it hardly mattered. To talk at a normal register was to whisper. Besides, the line for Pho Hoa on its own was as gentrified as downtown Oakland. They blended enough. As the bartender told his story, the din of the tourists and workers snuffed out his words before they had the chance to echo another foot beyond.

  There was a member of the club, he told her. A man. Mid-40s. Wealthy beyond imagination. While Sarah was hosting one night, he hit on her and she politely rebuffed him. But that was far from the end of it. The man later held court out on the roof deck, quaffing cocktail after cocktail. He demanded Sarah wait on him, even though that wasn’t her job. It didn’t matter. The manager told her to serve the man as best she could. At least she would get a decent tip out of it. Sarah’s hands were visibly shaking when she delivered cocktails and small plates to the man and his cohorts. When she put a wedge of lime in his old fashioned by accident, he grabbed her by the wrist so she couldn’t walk away.

  “Is this what you think goes in an old fashioned?” he asked her.

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s all right, cutie pie. At least you’re something to look at.”

  Sarah ended her shift that night shaken, but still standing. The man came back the next week. And the next. Whenever she turned down his advances, he would berate her while keeping a smile on his face. Initially, this all came across as light teasing. Only he would keep at it. He openly blamed her if something else in the club wasn’t to his satisfaction, like when the lighting was a shade too bright, or when the music was too docile. Whenever he was displeased, and it was often, we would call on Sarah and ask his “little piggy” to address the issue. Sarah begged the manager to let her port home whenever the man came in, but the boss refused because it would have been his ass if he did. This man was far too important to displease.

  Eventually, the obnoxious patron learned Sarah’s name and took to stalking her outside of the club.

  “What’d he look like?” Anna asked the bartender. A pedestrian walking by gave her a crude elbow to make room for himself, but she didn’t feel it.

  “Tall guy. Thin, black hair parted down the middle. Fake tan. Big gums and tiny little teeth.”

  “Why didn’t you do anything to stop him?”

  “No one could. You don’t understand.”

  “No, you’re right. I don’t. Was it someone who owned the place?”

  “It’s someone who owns every place,” he told her. “Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “Wait.”

  “You understand now why I can’t have you ever going back there? You don’t need a police sketch for this guy. It’s someone everyone knows.”

  The loose details the bartender gave of the man now fused into a single image. She felt so much worse than she had minutes ago.

  “Is it—”

  “I’m not gonna tell you his name,” the bartender told her. “All I can tell you is that I don’t get as hyped up for the unveiling of a new PortPhone as I used to.”

  SEWELL HALL

  Anna sealed herself off in Room 24. Bamert had stuck around Ho Chi Minh City to brave the line and get a bowl of pho (two bowls, actually), but Anna was in no such mood. She found herself frenzied and nauseous, the way she felt that first night coming out of Vick’s office. Her mind was a pressurized tube with no release valve.

  Simple vomiting wouldn’t do the trick. There was no way to purge the dread. It was a permanent installation, as nagging and permanent as a chronic pain. Nothing soothed it. The black curtain was coming over her, heavy and thick. She opened the window of her bedroom to get a shock of cold air, but it tasted acidic. She got into bed, but every position felt more uncomfortable than the last. She wanted to sleep in all morning like a normal teenager on a Sunday, but it was impossible.

  Does this happen to other people? Do their bodies and minds turn on themselves so viciously? And why is this room so dusty? Someone is trying to poison you. Asbestos. Asbestos everywhere. You’re breathing it in. It’s burning.

  She had a face to her nightmares. Jason Kirsch. Jason Kirsch was the Chief Creative Officer at PortSys and Lara’s half-brother. He was forty-five years old and married with four children. He was the presumptive heir to Emilia and the entire PortSys dynasty. He was also a stalker and a murderer. What did he do that night to Sarah, anyway? Did he shoot her and plant the gun? Why? Anna took out her smartphone and looked at all the photos of Jason Kirsch online: standing on a stage in a pristine black t-shirt, wireless mic tucked discreetly by his cheek, a fancy PortPhone prototype looming on a big screen behind him. She watched a product launch video and listened to Jason regale a bunch of fawning tech reporters with his standard, airy-fairy horseshit about changing the world.

  That voice. You know that voice.

  That was the same voice that emanated out of the tinny speakers of Vick’s laptop. Jason Kirsch was there when Vick used her as a guinea pig. That’s why she was holding a 2.5kg weight every time she stepped into the wormhole. Anna Huff was a test subject for an expanded port network.

  She went over to the r/Conquistadors forum and read some of K15’s assorted works. The group met in person every week to hoist pints of beer and stoke their collective grudge against the rest of humanity: a toxic pocket of humanity spreading itself across terra firma. Every post of K15’s ran over 5,000 words long, written in a brutalist intellectual-ese that had her pining for the relative lucidity of her homework assignments. He wrote of a “true globalism,” in which “great men” could exercise dominion over any land they wished. One passage slapped her hard across the cheek:

  “It is not a concern of the Great Man to heed rejection: be it from an institution, or from an agent of commerce, or from a member of the female persuasion. That last group is perhaps most pertinent of all, such is their need to reject. This appeals to their virtue and, at the same time, allows them to use that false virtue as a cudgel against those who might want to level the playing field of the battle of the sexes. I see no reason to indulge these strumpets and their lamentations over what is chivalrous and what are the actions of a cad. I do not believe in rejection. I only believe there are those who recognize my greatness and submit accordingly, and those who are pathetically, willfully blind. I find the latter, frankly, a more satisfying nut to crack.”

  God, he’s as much of a pig as your old man was.

  She created her own anonymous account and sent K15 a private message.

  “Hi yeah you say you don’t believe in rejection. Is it because rejection is probably all you’ve ever known?” she asked him.

  Surprisingly, he was swift to react. “And you are?”

  “I’m nobody, which is weird because a nobody like me should be in awe of a supposedly Great Man like you.”

  “Indeed, you should be. That I’ve deigned to reply to you means you’re touching greatness you would otherwise never be able to approach.”

  “Some people may be ‘great’ but that doesn’t mean everyone else is worthless.”

  “Well, you are. Why don’t you kill yourself?”

  “Why don’t I report you to the moderators for that?”

  “LOL go right ahead. I own this site, you stupid cow.”

  That was enough DMing for her. She thought about the night at Druskin Gate with her poor mother. Now, the truth tightly wrapped around her
heart.

  You can’t love Lara now. You know that. It’s an impossibility. You were a dumbfuck for ever thinking it wasn’t. It was a mistake to keep porting. It was a mistake to break your promise to Mom. It was a mistake to find out the truth because now it’s going to ruin you. You’ll never escape it because you don’t have the smarts or the courage to beat it. You should have stayed dumb and selfish, like every other teen out there. This was all a mistake. You’re a mistake. You suck. The world would be better off if Sarah had lived and you had fallen into a sewer. You should—

  “You know,” Asmi said from the doorway, “I felt bad when I nicked the big room for you, but it turns out you like to sneak out of here more often than a bloody diabetic does.”

  See now, Asmi was the clever one. Asmi knew when to take shelter from the world when it was offered.

  “I’m sorry I woke you up,” Anna said.

  Asmi sat beside her. “You stink.”

  “I know. I’m a terrible roommate.”

  “No, I mean you literally stink. You get sunburned in October. You stay up all night cutting up blankets like a freakshow. You duck out of here at 5am in the morning and you come back here with the smell of lotus blossoms and warm piss in your hair.”

  “Um…” There was that “um” again. Dead. “The diving well. So much chlorine. I have to use a strong shampoo.”

  “Come off it. You’re porting. You really did steal a battery from Vick!”

  Anna groaned. “I’m not gonna port off campus again, I swear to God.”

  “Is that why you needed a business alias? Is this how you knew where to put the vans? Has my dad been paying you to go on holiday in Vietnam all this time? Did you also lie to me about what happened with Dean Vick, you shitstain?”

  “No. Look, all the shady things we did to help with your dad’s business were legitimate shady things. Boy, that sounds awful the way I phrased it.”

  “Why are you porting?”

  “There was something I had to find out and I didn’t want you to get in trouble. I didn’t want them to send you to Vick.”