Everything Abridged, page 10
Before Leto could move on to the next natural question, she gingerly placed her lunchbox-sized metallic case on the table. She flicked both latches open at the same time and opened the case with religious reverence. This revealed a handgun lying in a sunken impression in a red, feltlike material. Leto wasn’t equipped to say much about it, except that it was gray, likely semiautomatic, and fired bullets. Judging by the empty magazine-shaped depression, she kept it loaded.
“Not bad, eh?” She had a proud parent’s glow.
“You’re definitely first,” Leto admitted.
“I meant the gun.”
“Sure,” Leto said as he shuffled through Professor Cardoso’s packet. For some unearthly reason, the professor kept the data tables between the extended hypothesis and procedure. He found the page for “Subject One” and marked down six minutes and twenty-five seconds.
“Thanks again for participating. You can get going after answering a few questions.”
The woman looked sullen. Leto had seen similar body language from his roommate after getting turned down by every dating profile within five miles.
“It’s really a very nice gun,” Leto volunteered.
She straightened up and beamed. “What do you need to know, Doc?”
“What’s your full name?”
“Jenny Fullbright Jr.”
“Age?”
“Thirty-seven next week.”
“Ethnicity?”
“I don’t like talking about race. Too much trouble.”
Leto marked down “White.”
“Occupation?”
“I’m like a construction worker, but for demolition. Are demolition workers a thing?”
“As long as you say they are,” Leto said, holding back a shrug. After a lifetime translating between Northeastern-speed English, patois, academic wank, L33T Sp33k, hip-hop buzzwords, undergraduate excuses, and drunk mumbles, he thought of language as something you bent until it got you where you were going.
“Cool. I’m a demolition worker for Pompey and Cherno. It’s a great gig, as long as you’re not too hung up on workplace safety. The hard hats aren’t nearly as important as watching yourself. It requires the kind of independent thinking people leave off their résumés.”
Leto double-checked the recorder as Jenny spoke. The professor wanted handwritten notes, but he wasn’t a stenographer by trade or volition.
“Address?”
“I’m on 283 Danby Lane. Mixed area. It’s the station between the right and wrong side of the tracks.”
“Hilarious,” Leto said, unmoved. “What kind of gun is that?”
“This little giant is a Dan Wesson Elite Series Titan. Twelve plus one ten-millimeter rounds. It’s not the kind of thing a carjacker walks away from.”
“Finally, but most importantly, how did you get it? Don’t spare any details.”
“Ah, all right. I was parked by the cedar tree in the faculty parking lot. I figured it was fine, since I’m here to help out some of the faculty, and I expect you guys to help me out if they pull a tow job. One good turn deserves not being a dick, right? Right.
“Should I speak into the recorder? You keep fiddling with it.
“I grabbed the impact-resistant—according to the box—case from my glove compartment. I used to keep it in the trunk, but that’s hard to reach during a live-fire situation. Since moving to Danby, I like to keep it close. I’d go for concealed carry, but I’ve got a fifty-hour week and that doesn’t leave time for a course in anything. It’s hard enough staying awake at work; even building implosions get old after a while. Maybe I should take my son to see the next one.”
Leto jotted down the highlights. “Thanks for your time. All six minutes of it. Your voucher’s in the mail.”
He stole out of the conference room to raid the department fridge. Leto didn’t keep anything in it, but the swollen remnants of the department’s Inclusive Thanksgiving-Adjacent Supper were waiting. A wealth of gimmick diet–friendly food was ready to be repossessed. He opted to squint at the unnatural shade of the vegan patties and pretend they tasted like human food. His body thanked him while his soul screeched.
Leto returned to find a squat young girl with convincing hair extensions texting in his chair. Leto recognized her from the back row of the Introduction to Sociology class he TA’d. It was his first time seeing her outside the filter of a hangover.
A world-weary M16 variant rested on the table. The stock had a spiderweb of cracks, the barrel was corroded, and the words engraved on the side were illegible. It could probably still clear a room of life in twenty seconds.
“Am I first?” she asked without looking up. Leto shook his head before realizing it’d go unseen. Then he took the guest chair.
“Not exactly, or at all. But thirty minutes is a great effort.”
The girl shrugged.
“So, questions. What’s your full name?”
That earned eye contact in the form of an indignant glare.
“I’m in your discussion group,” she said tersely. “I talk every time. Half our grade is based on class participation. What exactly are you basing that on?”
Traditionally, he gave students that avoided falling asleep full marks. This allowed him to have a “student-driven discussion” and spend the hour in a comforting fog between meditation and a coma. The seating chart spared him the need to pair names and faces. Leto put on an innocent mask and waited for an answer.
“Jesus. It’s Ava Xang.”
Leto jotted the name down. “It’s good to see you, Ava. How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“Ethnicity?”
“I’m Laotian.”
“Occupation?”
She went back to glaring. Leto jotted down “Student.”
“Where do you live?” he asked, undeterred.
“I split my time between the dorms and my parents’ house. I’ve told you that. We had a whole conversation about it.”
Leto’s memory drifted to the department’s quarterly meet-and-greets. He looked harmless by default, leading an endless array of undergraduates to describe their lives, hopes, and dreams in painstaking detail. Graduate students had access to wine, which made recollecting any of it a challenge. He had a thin memory of three girls Ava’s height blocking his access to the pigs in a blanket.
“How’d you find the gun? Don’t spare any details.”
“It’s a family heirloom, from the war. Well, the war over there, another war over here. It belonged to my grandfather, who was too cagey to throw in with the rebels and too smart to throw in with the government. My dad passed it on to me, along with the story. I keep it back at the house; it’s not the kind of accessory you can explain to your dorm mate.
“Gramps lived in the north right when tensions were building up. He wasn’t political, but he drank with his brother, who kept one of Marx’s books on his bedside. The liquor helped with the paranoia.
“One night, after sleeping off a hangover, he found a white man in bad camouflage in his yard. Unconscious. The guy had underestimated the drop from the estate wall to the estate proper. Which I guess is the point of having a wall.
“Gramps thought it was a drunk reporter until he noticed the assault rifle in the bushes. This is an assault rifle, right? My ex always complained about people getting that wrong.
“Then Gramps went for his pockets. My dad claims he was investigating, but I think he was after a free lunch. Do people still use that expression? Anyway, he found a CIA ID card, and—I shit you not—a picture of him and his brother at the bar.”
Leto didn’t bother cloaking the skepticism radiating from his face. He just put his chin on his fist and waited for her to finish bullshitting.
“They did what anyone would do. Strip the agent, paint wangs on his forehead, and dump him in the embassy bushes. Then Gramps took the next smuggler’s ship out of the country, while his brother stayed to fight for whatever he was fighting for. Gramps survived, his brother didn’t.”
“Unfortunate,” Leto said dryly. He used his teaching voice, a pitiless monotone he’d cribbed from a British sitcom.
“Right, you’re a skeptic. I remember that from the half of class you’re awake for. Take a look at this.”
Ava produced a blue folder from her backpack and flicked it onto the table. Leto opened it out of professional obligation. Inside he found a crumpled polaroid of two drunk men with tragic fashion blindness, the faded CIA ID card of one Bobby Rumsfeld, and a second, religiously preserved polaroid of the first two men pointing at a slumped-over, naked Bobby.
“Well, holy shit,” Leto mumbled.
“See you in class,” Ava said curtly. She left without taking a complimentary mint.
Ava wasn’t the only student involved in the study. Over the next four hours, five of Leto’s charges came through with a shotgun, a pair of cheap pistols, a modified AR-15, and a homemade hunting rifle. They seemed to believe that extra credit was involved.
Leto tried to be polite with the last child to arrive. The guy was young enough to be another one of his students, and he didn’t feel like repeating the first embarrassment. The subject tilted the chair backward, moved a hand to adjust the brim of his baseball cap, and nearly fell over. Leto allowed him to make his recovery without comment.
“Five hours, seven minutes. That’s pretty good time, you’re in the top ten.”
“Man, do you really think I’m going to bring a gun onto a college campus in 2016?” He crossed his arms over a black T-shirt with “Megadeth” written in blocky white letters. “Metallica” was tattooed on his left arm in more angular, gunmetal-gray letters. Whether the other side of his hat said “Anthrax” or “Slayer” was anyone’s guess. Leto wondered how the youth would respond to the world of music recorded after Y2K.
“Fair enough,” Leto said, shrugging. “We expected a few failures. Shit, I was hoping for them.” He caught himself dialing to a looser, more aggressive voice. It was the way his television said black men talked to each other. He self-consciously dialed back to academia.
“What’s your name?”
“Dan C.”
“Full name.”
“Daniel Cee.” He traced the last name in the air with his finger. Leto got the feeling he wasn’t being taken entirely seriously. Which was fine, since he had trouble taking himself entirely seriously.
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen. On a good day I can get a drink at a show. The local staff’s usually afraid to make a fuss carding me, and after an all-nighter I’ve got the face of someone pushing thirty.”
“Uh-huh. Ethnicity?”
“You blind?” asked Dan. He punctuated the question with a cavalier smirk.
“Play along.”
“Real niggas don’t play.”
Leto groaned and wrote “Black/African-American.” He’d always had trouble contending with senses of irony outside of his own, and Dan had perfectly imitated his earlier flash of tough-guy cadence.
“Where do you live?”
“I’m at 120 Danby Lane, on the bougie side. Takes me about fifteen minutes to walk to campus. I’m splitting an apartment with some econ grad students. They’re like you, but fun and employable.”
“Occupation?”
“Student, like I said. I’m in the same group as Ava. She’s pissed, by the way.”
“Amusing,” Leto admitted. “Since you couldn’t get your hands on a gun, that’s all I’ll need. Thanks for your time.”
Dan whipped a revolver out of his coat and leveled it at Leto’s forehead. Instead of finding his inner hero, Leto found his arms and legs locked in place. Terror kept him from breathing. The tip of the barrel was microns from his left eye, which he was very attached to.
“Blam!” Dan shouted, jerking the gun backward and upward to sell the shtick. Leto felt his heart bounce against his rib cage. He manually restarted the process of filling his lungs with air and pushing it out.
“Daniel Cee,” Leto started. It was taking time for the whole of his body and mind to process the fact that he was still alive. The war zone–level adrenaline alone made staying seated a test of his dedication.
“Yup,” said the prankster.
“You have a diseased fucking sense of humor, and one day someone crazier is going to murder you for it.”
“Damn. Maybe I’ll keep the gun, then.”
Leto smiled against his will. Dan ejected the loader and flicked it, showing six empty chambers.
“This is a science thing, right? Don’t you have any, you know, science questions?” Dan asked. He spun the revolver on the table to keep himself busy.
“Tell me how you found the gun. Be descriptive.”
“Finding the first gun was easy. I just went to Jumbo Emporium and asked. The clerk—he was a tool, like you—looked me over and said I could get one if I paid in cash. Asshole. I saw that the cheapest one there cost thirty-five dollars and handed over two twenties.
“Then I asked what the waiting period here’s like, since I’ve got shit to do next week and your experiment isn’t exactly my top priority. He put the gun in a bag, threw in two boxes of ammo, and handed me the receipt.
“Finally, I had an idea. I looked up gun shows on Craigslist and found one going on downtown. They had a gun exchange event, full of the best kind of paranoid targets. People waiting for their neighbors to roll on them tend not to pay enough attention to scams. I traded the glock for an actual Glock, the Glock for a hunting rifle, the hunting rifle for an old flare gun, the flare gun for a crate of M16 bullets, and the crate of bullets for one of those PMC-style automatic shotguns. Finally, I traded that for the handgun from Dirty Harry. I forgot to use the ‘Do you feel lucky, punk’ line while I was showing off earlier.”
“While that’s an extremely large and dangerous revolver, it’s not the one from Dirty Harry.”
“Why would you ruin that for me?” spat Dan. He left the gun on the table and stormed into the hallway. Ten seconds later, the sound of a distant steel door slamming echoed back into the conference room. Leto stared at the pistol for six solitary minutes before taking it to the faculty lounge and adding it to the pile.
The collection had grown admirably. Jenny Fullbright Jr.’s pistol sat at the bottom of an eight-foot-wide, ten-foot-long, and four-foot-high hill of unloaded firearms. Muzzles, stocks, and rusted bayonets protruded from every edge of the pile. A few of the subjects had offered live ammo, but Leto had politely declined and later followed the online instructions for checking the weapons for unspent rounds. The experiment was dangerous enough without adding negligence to the equation.
Most of the lounge’s furniture had been pushed into the hallway to make room for the pile, with the exception of a single-seat leather couch. Professor Cardoso reclined under an administration-mandated “No Smoking” sign and blew two attempts at smoke rings to the ceiling. It wasn’t a habit that made her many friends. She regarded the gallery of guns of every size, origin, and legality with distant interest. After taking in this sight, Leto wondered if this was even the first time she’d run the experiment.
“Promising results?” she asked.
Leto shook his head. “No promise at all. It’ll make a great book.”
Nobel, Alfred: The inventor of dynamite rebranding.
novel: A form dangling on the edge of popular interest.
novella: A form that fell off the edge of popular interest.
North America: The half with an ego problem.
North Carolina: The Luigi of states.
nostalgia: A quiet yearning for the disease, mysticism, backbreaking labor, and social repression of the past.
nursing homes: Pre-funeral storage.
NYPD: The proud foundation of the rubber bullet industry.
O
obesity: The last war the United States formally surrendered until 2021.
obituary: Heartfelt, personalized compliments you’ll never get to read.
oceans: Carefully guarded reserves for plastic forks.
Odin: The Norse god of war, the dead, and double vision.
Oklahoma!: A play referenced more frequently than its namesake.
Old Bay: A staple spice for future victims of heart disease.
Oldboy: A love story.
Olympus: Home of roughly one-tenth of Zeus’s children.
omnipotence: 1. Warping time and space at will.
2. Failing to keep your creations out of a fruit tree.
omniscience: Knowledge of how every movie you ever watch will end.
onomatopoeia: Comic book sound effects, such as bang, pow, property of the Walt Disney Corporation, and zap.
opera: A cultural export consistently lost at sea.
opinions: 1. The only truly free gift.
2. Facts with imagination.
3. Thanksgiving’s main course.
opioids: A pandemic designed, propagated, and treated by America’s finest doctors.
Oppenheimer, J. Robert: The loving and quotable peace advocate that has killed us all.
orcas: The first sea creatures to demand reparations from the U.S. government.
origami: The ancient art of starting the same YouTube tutorial sixteen times.
Oscars, the: The annual celebration of the creativity, glamour, and legacy of the Oscars.
Ottoman Empire: World War I’s last draft pick.
Overton Window: The range of policies a population will accept before making a mean tweet.
Own Goal
January 2
Today’s Album: Crash the Colony by Desert Tsunami
I spent the first half of the day comparing caskets. I’d never organized a funeral before, but I knew the body had to go somewhere.
The front-runner offered a protective layer of hand-engraved silica tiles. A good casket needed to look like it could survive reentry. Odds were it never got the chance and simply joined the rest of the space junk floating around between colonies. But a sturdy casket gives attendees peace of mind. They imagine everyone in Mom’s generation ends up back on Earth eventually.
I thought that way when she was sick. Now that she’s gone, I’m not sure it matters where I send what’s left. Nonetheless, I didn’t have anything better to do at work, so I scrolled through a catalog online. The eye implant’s good for getting away with that kind of thing.
