The Immune System, page 20
Throw this open. My pants, unceremoniously crumpled into a ball. That’s it, that’s all. Pull ’em out, cursing, start stepping into them. Do up the fly, jam my hand into the pockets, hold on . . . A slip of paper . . . Unfold it, have a look, my vision wonky: Procedure/Abdulaziz royals successful. In recovery at the Mercer Hotel. Understand what purpose they serve and act accordingly. God bless the true Union.
Illegible signature. Could only be the doctor, right?
Processing. Too much action afoot here. It’s either an idiot’s trap or . . .
Genomic obstetrics. Kavan. Haifa.
I turn to the lady doctor, shoving the note back into my pants, arms out in a what-the-fuck gesture. “Where is the rest of my shit?”
The gal rolls her orbs some more, flips them down as if to indicate the tape covering her mouth.
“Lemme recast that. I came in with a whole mess of—” Stop cause it occurs I’d lost all of my gear in my tête-à-tête with Scratch.
She’s shaking her head.
Sigh.
I toss the room, Gilda watching me ruefully. Come up with:
• four bottles of an off-brand hand sanitizer
• a box of surgical gloves
• handful of procedure masks
• two scalpels (I hesitate for a scant moment, then grab them)
• A white penlight with the GlaxoSmithKline logo
All to the good, but this leaves me gunless, hatless, shirtless . . . lacking rations, lacking all my sources of comfort, I’m barefoot in baggy suit-pants and a hospital gown.
My chest flutters like a moth. Grab my molested pill bottle off the metal table, along with a half dozen alcohol swabs. Take a gander at the white girl on the floor as I’m wiping down the bottle. She’s gone and lost her glasses in our quick tussle just now. See ’em on the floor nearby, flimsy tortoiseshell plastic . . . get a new set of gloves and, sweeping up the eyewear, gently slide it over her ears. Pat her under the chin with my bloody hand, leaving a smudge there.
Blinking at me. That wall eye.
“You can tell your supervisor I wasn’t cooperative, honey bun,” I say. “You wouldn’t be lying.” Feeling pretty proud of myself as I get primed to bounce.
At which point the lights go out, and I hear the groan, the sub-bassy dip of the entire building losing power.
Shit.
Then the gunfire begins.
There’s about ten minutes of consistent shooting, automatic and semiautomatic fire. I can’t quite determine how many actors might be involved, and neither can I get a read on its location . . . the action seems to be moving between floors.
Dig up a flashlight, swing it back and forth along the far wall. There’s a window, sealed and painted over. My pulse is hot in my neck as I grab the bubble-eyed girl again, put the light in her face along with a scalpel.
“Now don’t be shy. We might be in here a spell. Listen to my voice, all right, boo?”
Lady jiggles her head.
“I’m gonna loosen this here. Scream and I cut your throat, no problem.”
Another head wag. I loosen the gag.
“Question. What. Hospital. Are. We. In. Quick.”
“It’s a private military—”
“What’d they used to call it?”
“Beth Israel, I think? I’m from Ottawa.”
“Fuck’s that got to do with anything?”
“We’re on 16th Street and 1st Avenue.”
“Good girl. How high up are we?”
“Seventh . . . no, eighth floor.”
Goddamnit. And what’s more: outside the door, heavy footfalls. I hear some radio static. I slip the gag back on her. She’s trembling.
Goddamnit.
Drag her back behind some heavy equipment. The sounds recede slightly. Pull her gag off again.
“Out the door here, which direction are the stairs?”
Her peepers scurry to and fro.
“It’s okay, sweetheart, just keep—”
A prolonged exchange of gunfire, this time extremely close.
Considering my exit options, grim as they are. If the info in her file is correct . . . if I’m sick, I might do just as well to throw open the door and fall out into bullet traffic.
Throw the penlight over to the window. I could knock it out, lift myself through, a quick drop to the street . . .
I finger the scalpel. One clean deep cut from the middle of my arm to the center of my wrists would sever the max number of arteries. It would be a swift bleed-out, and a hasty curtain call for one Dewey Decimal.
Then I get real with myself.
Hold the credits. Cause I ain’t going out like that. As tempting as it may be. Bitches, I can only be me.
I ball hard. I rip all the spots. And I won’t be faded.
Am I terminally ill? Am I days, weeks, months from death?
It vibes true. My body says yes, yes. At last we can address this thing.
I’m on my knees now, getting prepped to retch. Breathing.
The girl is calling to me but I can’t hear her over the gunplay and my own inhalation.
Yeah. The pills.
Snippets here and there: a glint in the DA’s peepers. The fucking joke was on me all along. Feeding me candy.
Bite my hand. Bite it hard. Draw blood.
There’s tears too. I wipe at them, leaving a smudgy trail, I imagine . . . then I put my knuckles to my cheek and do a little face-painting.
War paint. Eye black on a quarterback.
Hand to Allah: the sole reason the thought of my death disturbs me is the simple fact that I am not done here.
But I am so tired. Would that I could lay down and sleep . . .
The gunfire slows, then stops completely. I listen and count to twenty. No, I am not finished. I will grind forth till the ugly motherfucking finale, trailing my tainted blood behind me like a slug.
Pity? I don’t need it. I don’t want it, especially from myself.
Grind forth.
Turn to the redhead, repeat: “What direction? The stairs?”
“Right, down the hall and around the corner. Should be in the middle of the hallway. I’ve never used them and can’t speak to their condition.”
Start to pull her gag back into place.
“Sir . . .”
I pause.
“If you get back on the Nortriptyline, you’ve got a very strong chance. I can point you toward some stock.”
I smile, put the gag back over her mouth. She blinks at me from behind her glasses.
Replace my procedure mask. Press my lips to her forehead. Withdraw. Say, “Ottawa must be a nice town.”
_________________
Stairwells, relentless with these tragic stairwells. Almost without exception they’re both wet and absolutely devoid of any illumination.
Pull my penlight, deciding better to risk it than bust my head up. Shoulder the weapons I scavenged off a dead soldier . . . machine gun and pistol fitted with silencer. Pull the dead man’s gas mask over my face.
Stairwells. In a blacked-out town. There’s the Death Star, there’s the private sites with generators, but for the most part it’s a dark chocolate–covered licorice town without electric light.
Speaking of dark chocolate, this is where Hakim Stanley will inevitably seek my skinny ass out.
Right about now, while I’m waiting for my ghosts, I reckon it’s time to run it all down. Cause nothing’s making sense. And in these instances, a wise man once told me: start with what you know.
All right, the bullet points, which I run down as I descend:
• The goodly Senator Howard calls on me to weed out squatters. Squatters potentially extremely disruptive to his operation . . . why? Knowing they’d find in me a sympathetic soul? Knowing perhaps I would help them? It doesn’t compute.
• Even more inexplicable: said senator entrusts me, of all fucking people, to essentially assure the continued life of the New World. In handing me the Saudi twins, he more of less gave the doomsday machine to a man prone to seizure, amnesia, and paranoid episodes (yes, I have this much insight . . . and with horror I realize my insight sharpens with every passing moment). It was a recipe for complete disaster, which is exactly what has come of it.
• Rogue elements in the Mossad and the Secret Service, tasked with taking the twins out.
• Mysterious Dr. Kavan, materializes to hip me to the pedigree of my implant . . . and now I see his attempts to fill me in vis-à-vis loggerheaded governmental factions caught in a struggle for control, the implication being the outcome w/r/t the twins was key . . . all this jibing with Scratch’s ramblings.
• Factions and fissures abound: within Cyna-corp. Within the clans. It’s like civil war upon civil war.
This chaos, this confusion, is the only, and truly the one and only, reason I am still on my grind and have thus far evaded the dirtnap. I don’t doubt that for a heartbeat.
So the odds are about as even as they get. Despite being trapped, outgunned, and overrun, stuck in a dark stairwell—I’m still on the scene, and despite it all, my rap is strong. Or at the very least: I ain’t dead yet.
Before I can finish myself off with the masturbatory reach-around, I freeze midstep.
Hold tight. A door below me is slammed open, and a bouquet of lasers is thrown up in my direction. Hold it. Boots scuffling.
Count the dots, they’re moving around, reckon it’s between nine and twelve dudes.
A muted, guttural exchange. And for the first time in memory, I can’t understand a word, not for lack of clarity—but because I lack comprehension of the language.
Though I understand it to be Russian, or some Slavic dialect. Just from the movies.
The gravity of this loss . . . I am devalued. And it’s irreparable. Feature this: me mourning the removal of the implant that’s compromised and molested my most intimate workings . . .
Sit my ass down and hold tight, though, cause, yo . . . in my old age I’m less inclined to take on groups in a gun battle. Starting to prefer things one-on-one. Less running around.
Guys downstairs hashing it out.
Touch the back of my neck . . . gauze, tape, still a bit numb. Lean over, wincing. Raise my head and Hakim’s seated next to me. My heart almost vaults out my mouth, but I recover . . . in a fucked-up kind of way I’m getting used to these visitations.
Hakim is still a nice-looking youth, even without his jaw. He’s got that freshness one would describe as “corn-fed” or “wholesome” if describing a white person. Being black, terms like “well-spoken” and “promising” would be employed, as if he were such an anomaly, overcoming his environment against great odds, as if all black people come from an environment that needs to be overcome.
It’s just the way we talk about shit, isn’t it?
Anyways, the fact that I killed this young man is apparently going to continue to haunt me forever and always, even without the implant.
“Hakim. Youngblood. Do I gotta apologize for shooting you every time we hang out?”
Hakim dips his chinless head. “Na.”
“A’ight. How you doing then?”
“I’m okay. . . sir,” he slurs, and salutes. Polite but with a minimum of eye contact.
He carries with him his own radiance, so I don’t need a light source to see the exposed muscles of his throat and tongue. His trachea. The detail is impeccable, certainly for a hallucination.
“You gonna keep creeping up on a brother, Private Stanley?” I ask, keeping it quiet.
Hakim shrugs. His exposed anatomy is fascinating. “Not up to me, sir.” Like he’s talking through a mouthful of honey.
“How’s that?” Crazy that we’re having an actual conversation.
“You keep showing up, sir.”
I don’t understand that and wait for something further. Finally I say, “Yeah, I reckon I do, huh.”
Stanley makes a sound like I used to make as a kid when I got to the bottom of my McDonald’s shake, something I’d do to annoy my moms. A ferocious throttle.
“Apologies for that, sir,” he says. Motherfucker is too polite. Then, “Lotta folks here waiting on you, sir.”
My lips go cold. “Where’s here, son?”
Hakim shakes his head. “It’s nowhere, sir. Just wanted to let you know a lotta folks here talking about what they’re gonna do when you arrive, sir. And word is you’re real close by. Sir.”
“What the fuck is that—”
A short laugh from one of the boys downstairs, who’s quickly shushed.
And Hakim is gone.
I’m alone in the dark. I’m chilled. And I don’t mean chilled out. I mean ice-down-the-Y-fronts kinda chilled. Cause that place Hakim spoke on . . . feel like I’m hurtling toward it, spinning, twisting, picking up speed.
Movement. Soldiers definitely headed in my direction, half-assedly attempting to be quiet.
Fucking stairwells, I’m telling you right now. No good shit has ever happened in a fucking stairwell.
I stand, gripping my guns. Time is nigh to move, Decimal.
Try to generate a mental picture of the building I’m in, having only ever seen it from the outside . . . rounded tower of windows facing east and south, north of this additions to which the tower is connected . . . Without a sense of where I am within the structure, either I’m going to exit onto 1st Avenue, or 16th Street.
Both would suck, but the avenue would very likely prove fatal.
Here they come, gear a-clatter, jangle jangle.
Only one way to go, really.
_________________
Natural light, even light as compromised as this, stuns me as I collapse onto the roof, not due to intensity, more due to my disbelief that this kind of light can still be found. I had expected night, heaviest night. Was depending on it, unwisely, to serve as cover. And shit—gotta get straight with the System, very much tied to the clock.
Now I’m ass-out, facedown on some wet roofing tile, chopped raw like steak tartar. Soft rain tickles my back, works at my wounds.
Sliver cuts . . . microbes just need a point of entry . . .
Get up, Decimal. Get up.
I dig hubbub as the Russians clock the daylight.
Move, Decimal.
As if I needed further motivation, at least two helicopters are audible, becoming louder by the moment.
What finally gets me into cat-cow position is the thought of the books.
Section 320. Political science.
I’m nowhere near completion of this category. Crazy-making business. But, but . . . what motivates me to haul my body off the ground is a pretty simple, cornball conceit.
Standing now, I commence hobbling toward the northern end of the roof. If I don’t complete my work, and if the as-yet-unorganized piles are left to rot—no one will ever know we were once a well-intentioned experiment. This nation. No one will be aware that we were ever anything but a despised techno-corpocracy, that for all our failures we had at one point some reasonable concepts to add to the mix of human history. All that will be left will be . . .
Plus: the twins. If they’ve survived this, and I can get to them—I’ll be holding a pretty nice hand, and might be able to affect some real-world shit . . .
At the edge now. Across an expanse of empty is a former apartment complex. The distance is about ten feet. Easy enough.
The Russians have joined me on the roof. Nice paramilitary kit, six guys. If they know who I am, if I am a shoot-on-sight kinda target, they would have done shot my ass already. Instead they’re approaching with care, the cat running point calling out to me, his voice lost to the din of the helicopters. Two choppers making the scene. I assess the rooftops . . .
Now. If you grew up male in an American inner-city setting, when it came to sports—you balled, period. And unless you were a big motherfucker destined to play center, to be a proper hooper, you had to learn how to jump.
Which is what I do now.
Throw the rifle across my shoulders. While backing up to get a running start, the Russians get wise and try to rush me, but I’m airborne, and it’s beautiful, baby, so glorious, this sensation amplified because I suspect it’s probably the last time I’ll experience this sort of physical freedom.
Lofty talk.
Gets real raw double-time as I bounce off the guardrail of a balcony, having missed the roof completely, I’m scrabbling for purchase, slippery, saying fuck fuck fuck, gripping the top rail, not contemplating the drop, I’ve got my bare foot between the bars on the concrete, dragging myself painfully up and over the railing.
Roll off my stomach, onto the pistol, which gouges my naked back . . . pulling the machine gun front, and I’m up and pawing at the glass sliding door leading into the apartment . . .
I get it open just as one of the birds comes level with me, thinking, Dive, dive, which was a solid call, cause I’m immediately covered in glass, first from the doors through which I just entered, then from the large plasma television that is atomized by the chopper’s guns. Wood, foam, bits of fabric are kicked up, and it occurs to me that I should shield my eyes.
Work myself sideways and back from the balcony, belly crawl, most painful thing at the moment being the rug burn. Fragments of the apartment tickle my back.
Gunfire ceases, I stay low and try to dig my surroundings peripherally. I’m facing a salmon-colored couch. Just visible is a Keith Haring print, an artist I’ve truly never appreciated (Crack Is Wack: go the fuck back downtown or do something real).
The rotary blades keeping the furniture stuffing aloft.
Spy the top of a door on the far wall. Hoping to fuck I’m not headed into a closet, I stagger up, staying low around the couch, jerk the handle, and Allah is great, I’m in a hallway—and now it’s a question of which crew can get downstairs first . . .
Shirts or skins.
Yet another fucking stairwell.
Thirteen flights. For good luck.
_________________
Well well now. I’m crouched in the foyer of the apartment complex next to a mummified Pekingese complete with leash and doggy sweater, forever baring its little shark teeth. My labored breath loud in my ears.
