Manhattan White approached on foot. Otto made himself scarce. White’s son sat on the open back end of the van, ice-cream stains on his shirt and snot running from his nose. He played with a pair of wire clippers.
“My name’s White.”
We’ve met.
“I’m Eric.”
“I know.”
“You got a first name?”
“They call me Manhattan. White will do. I understand you’re a chemist, Eric.”
“I am.”
“What I want to know is, why?”
“Can you be a little clearer?”
“Why did I drive all this way to meet you? Why should our business back you when I’ve got a hundred guys who can do the same thing? Why is it you’re better than they are?”
“I don’t know who they are, White, so I don’t know if I’m better.”
“I hear you’ve opened a window to God.”
“That was an experiment.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
“What I want to do is something nobody else has done.”
“Again, my question is, why?”
“Couldn’t tell you. Maybe some unresolved questions about God from when I was younger. All I know is I’ve got the focus and the patience for it and there’s not many other jobs that will indulge me that way.”
“We’re not here to indulge you, either, or help you with your childhood issues. We’re here to make a profit and to do so inconspicuously. You’re here to build us a lab, for which you will be well paid.”
“So you say. Let’s have a look.”
White unlocked three deadbolts on the front door. The inside looked as though a family of shut-ins had survived a decade of collective agoraphobia on canned beer, frozen dinners, cigarettes and television, and were finally evicted by a tribe of drunk monkeys driving snowblowers.
“What’s that noise?” I asked. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from at first, but it sounded like a finger squeaking across a wet windowpane, thousands of them.
“What noise?”
“Is there an attic here?”
White looked to the ceiling. “Of course,” he said. “Bats. Don’t worry. They’re harmless.”
“And dirty.”
White pressed the solitude and space the house afforded. I countered with the need to disconnect the gas for the heating and stove because I couldn’t have open flames. I wanted to map the circuits so I could shut down certain outlets and work with the select few I needed.
“That sounds excessive,” White said.
“How many accidents have you had to cover up?” I asked.
“A few. It’s a numbers game and accidents are part of the risk.”
“It’s only a numbers game when you leave it to amateurs or chance,” I said, then pointed to the outlets at floor level. “See those?”
“Yeah, they’re plugs. And?”
“And they’re not grounded, so if you’re pulling too much current from them, they tend to spark. That’s why you’ve got those burn marks on the slots. You can have either fumes or sparks, but you can’t have both.”
“You want to rewire the place and ground the power. Not cheap.”
“For starters. Lesson two: ether. We’ll be using it in quantity. It’s colorless, odorless and inflammable.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Not unflammable, inflammable, so the fumes can, and will, blow.”
“I hear you, Eric. Jesus, fix the sparks, then.”
“It doesn’t need sparks. Ether is heavier than air, so the vapors flow to ground level and then build up. Most lab fires happen when the fumes reach a wall socket and spontaneously ignite. You know the rest.”
Time and materials were needed to prep the place, all of which were alien to White, but my list of gear was old news because he and his organization were in the business of procuring them for their legions of pyromaniac amateurs.
“We got guys everywhere working for us, and our guys have guys working for them. Most of them are runners,” White began.
Runners, or coyotes, who worked at piecemealing together large stashes of matchbooks, road flares and cold medicine to avoid the Man’s eyes. One of Hoyle’s runners, so far down the chain nobody knew his name, used a counterfeit license, provided by the chain, for making certain purchases. He also used it to gain entry into a nightclub where he got hammered on some sugary girl drink, made the wrong move on the wrong woman and wouldn’t take no for an answer until he heard it from the doorman’s flashlight. The cops pulled him over later on a suspected DUI. They seized two gallons of hospital-grade iodine in his trunk. Coyote sobered up in County with eight gangbangers tattooed like a collective flesh-and-blood Sistine Chapel. He didn’t shower for four days pending arraignment and refused to call anyone.
He cut a deal and the DA cut him loose with a tapeworm stuck to his ribs.
“Get the bag, son,” White shouted over to his van.
The boy hopped out, dragging with him a large, plastic bundle. The drooling man-boy moved with an odd grace, shifting his weight and anchoring his feet, hauling the bag from the van. It struck the dirt with a noise like a coconut wrapped in a wet towel. As much as I didn’t want to look, I knew better than to look away.
“My son does all of this,” said White. “Drains all of their fluids out and wraps them up. This happens if you fail a performance review and we fire you, like when this kid got scared and decided he could wear a tapeworm to a drop.”
The head looked mummified, wrapped in cheesecloth or surgical gauze with stains seeping through in different stages of yellow, red and brown. The body was wrapped in a single layer of chicken wire.
“We’ll dump him when we’re done here. Toe Tag weighed his stomach down with rocks so he’ll sink. The bottom feeders get through the chicken wire and pick the flesh from the bone. There’s catfish the size of dogs in some of the these lakes out here. You don’t want to order fish at any of the mom-and-pop joints between here and New Mexico.”
thirteen
I’D SAY THE BUGS ARE MOCKING ME BUT THEY’RE NOT PROGRAMMED FOR THAT. The fuzzy logic of mockery doesn’t justify the engineering cost. Instead, they record everything with heat-sensitive cameras and motion-triggered microphones. They’re programmed to eat wallpaper paste, grease stains and bread crumbs, to shit into carpet, drop eggs into baseboard cracks, and they’re built for speed. I’ve only caught a few.
The autopsy project has taken on a life of its own as I take the lives of more bugs. Specimens lie splayed onto cardboard dug from the trash, stripped and pinned with paperclips and thumbtacks. I’ve checked antennae polarity between every possible configuration, without a spark, an arc or a hint of current.
These weren’t built with silicon circuits. All the foil in the world won’t stop these bleeding-edge, bioengineered organisms because they’re bred, not built, for transferring data the same way they’ve done for millions of years through dances, wing-flutter code and antenna semaphores. They spread news of food, danger, a new nesting location, my running solitaire statistics and bathroom habits.
Their engineering evolves with each generation, the progeny faster and their camouflage better. They hide in the fluttering shadows thrown by swaying power lines outside my window, or the shimmering reflections from a glass of water. They can look like patterns in the hallway carpet, red diamonds with yellow highlights, black squares like processor chips or irregular blobs from coffee stains or blood. Snap on a light and instead of scattering, they freeze where they’re crawling and disappear.
They move in the dark, legions of them on every surface of my room and my skin. Sometimes I’ll think I’ve stepped on a slippery pebble before the exoshell cracks like an apple skin and there’s something wet beneath my foot, something else scurrying over my toes. They whisper to each other, monitor my sleep, fluid intake, pulse, temperature and record my conversations. The ones I’ve killed by accident or design are bigger than the rest, relay points or data backup
s, so they’re easier to catch. Their system is rife with redundancies, so the death of one messenger doesn’t derail the flow of data. My recent specimens flutter inside an empty baby food jar, awaiting the cockroach chop shop. They climb atop one another, scrambling for the punctured lid and fall backward like marbles rattling against the glass. The noise keeps me awake.
I pull the sheets from my bed, tie the corners together and throw the bundle out the window. I tear open a box of Borax, dumping it into every corner and crevice I find. Someone knocks and I have a small heart attack.
I answer the door in my underwear, my body dusted with boric acid.
“Have you been talking?” Suit and tie. He looks familiar.
“I’ve been cleaning.”
“You were supposed to call me with an address.”
“Are you an exterminator?
“I’m your lawyer.” He steps into my room without invitation. “We have business,” he says. “While you’re housecleaning, Anslinger is burying you. He doesn’t sleep and he doesn’t stop working. He’s a machine. Do you understand me?”
My memory comes into focus. Morell.
“Can I get you anything?” I ask. “Water? I have a sink.”
Decades of junky sex and a contract hits have stained the mattress with dark Rorschach shapes. One looks like a dog, another a clown. Morell sits on the bare corner beside a burning nun, his briefcase in his lap.
“What have you been using?” he asks.
“Boric acid.”
“No, you. What have you been shooting?”
“Nothing. I’m clean and I can prove it if you’ve got a coffee cup.”
“No, you are not clean. And I can’t help you unless you are.”
I thrust my arms out, wrists up, dotted with the cigarette burns. My bites aren’t as advanced as those on Jack and the Beanstalk. They must be scratching too much.
“Insects. They’re eating me in my sleep. The place is crawling with them,” I explain, and at night they’re everywhere. Most of them are too fast for me. I slap at the night table corners and shadow specks on my bedspread, but they’re gone before my palm hits. I thought they were planting tracking chips, but they’re not mechanical. They’re marking me, like cats pissing on furniture, so the squads assigned to a different detail don’t monitor the wrong target.
“Let’s move you somewhere else,” says Morell.
“They’ll follow me. Or signal others. I think they work for Anslinger.”
“I’m going to assume you haven’t recalled anything helpful.” Morell sighs, staring at the cockroach chop shop. “Here’s my card. Again.” He stands, reaching into his pocket. “Check in with me in two days, whether you remember anything or not. And if you do consider moving, let me know this time.” He leaves.
“They can still track me,” I say to his back.
The drones in my head explode into a furious, flapping cloud. This must be what a brainstorm feels like. Like missing the first bug hidden in plain sight, I had been looking everywhere except under my nose. A stretch of bites covers both forearms, a finger’s width from a vein. Big, small, small. Small. The different-sized bugs make the different-sized bites, unless I’ve picked or scratched and inflamed one of them, which destroys the sequence. Small, small, small. Small, small. Small, big, small. Small. Small. If they can track me, I can track them.
They could be sex toys or time machines as much as pipes, lined up on shelves labeled “Not for Sale to Persons Under 18 Years of Age” like rows of sleeping, mutant genies below a mural of Jimi Hendrix. Smaller pipes, along with scales, mirrors and scores of paraphernalia are spread beneath glass cases like alien medical instruments.
A display of makeup sits atop a jewelry case. I grab a bottle of nail polish the luminous yellow of a school crossing sign. I hand it to the white kid with dreadlocks behind the register and ask for a black lightbulb.
I can tell my room is different. Everything is shifted so slightly.
fourteen
THEY PREACHED ARMAGEDDON, THE COMING RACE WAR, THE OVERTHROW OF our Zionist-occupied government and they stank. I see balls of fog in lieu of faces, like my jail-cell mirror reflection. They were target practicing in their living room with a pellet gun. The row of shredded and tattered stuffed animals is on my right, then my left, and the walls change color as one time and place bleeds into the next, the details slipping from beneath my memory like mercury.
You stroke my wrist, back and forth, the way you did when you couldn’t sleep, so you wouldn’t let me, either.
Their nicknames fit them too well or not at all. Pinstripe, Gash, Flash, Joker. They sounded like dwarfs, or candy bars. Ashtrays, cheeseburger wrappers, razorblades and hamster pipes on the coffee table, scorched foil and dried blood in the bathroom sink. A mound of underwear below the empty cardboard spool soaked up the toilet overflow. Iodine stains on the ceiling, the stench of brake fluid and road flares, the burn marks outnumbered only by their excuses for the damage. Silence drooled from their open mouths when I asked them the molecular weight of carbon, the vapor pressure of toluene or the flashpoint of diethyl ether.
The Chain was going about it all wrong, I’d told White, trusting amateurs scattered among unconnected labs. Amateur cooks don’tfollow formulas as they should. They don’t master the basics and think they can improvise. They create emergencies, which create problems for everyone.
“You will work in teams of two,” I explained. “One team will tear strikers from the matchbooks—“
“Can we use matchboxes?” one of them asked, cutting me off.
“Yes. You can use matchboxes. Two of you will tear strikers from the books.”
“Or the boxes.”
“Or the boxes,” I paused, waiting for the next interruption, which never came. “And two of you will sand the strikers with a Dremmel.”
“What’s a Dremmel?”
“Don’t mind him, he’s new,” another one said.
“You’re all new.”
“Nuh uh. I’ve been doing this shit for years.”
“Not my way, you haven’t.”
“You need to relax, man. I can handle this.”
I hadn’t driven that distance to take shit from some toothless tractor-pulling tweaker.
“Explain that.” I pointed to the scorch mark on the coffee table.
“It was an accident.”
“And that?” The rust-colored fog stained into their ceiling was from evaporated iodine. “How many accidents have you had?” I kicked a glass bowl, already cracked from sloppy handling and coated with the residue amateur cooks leave for cops to scrape up. That seemed to end it.
“This is a Dremmel.” I held up the cordless drill, fitted with a sanding bit. “Do a five count,” I said. “Five strokes, all the same direction. Not too quickly, but not too hard. You don’t want the strikers getting too hot, and you do not want to drop them, whatever you do.” I demonstrated the slow, gentle strokes for removing the dust from the matchbook striker.
This crew was going to harvest phosphorus. Other crews would do likewise, others would purify iodine or harvest another precursor. Each lab would specialize in a single ingredient, producing far more of an individual precursor than their previous yields of finished product with fewer procedures so a reduced risk of an accident. Labs would be linked by coyotes who transferred cash, materials or finished chemicals between specific points. Each pair of runners would have their own set of codes and signals. None of the crews would know who or where the other crews were. Anyone caught had nobody to roll over on. If anyone went missing or was more than five minutes late, the crew was to cut and run.
“We keep your crews,” I’d told White. “None of that changes. We split the duties. We assign each crew a specific job. The same group can produce at least twice as much precursor as they can product.”
“And the product?” White asked. “What about it?”
Everything converged at the first house Otto and I had set up, Oz, where we’d take care
of the final manufacturing. Hoyle got his More, but with less money and less risk. I got paid, got White off my back, and had more time to work on my own.
“We do the final synthesis at Oz,” I said. “In the mean time, the guys you have in place are doing fewer operations with fewer solvents and less equipment. There’s less risk, and in the event of an accident, less damage to product and gear, less likelihood of detection and less to disperse in an emergency.”
The monotony posed the biggest threat. Guys like these took their payment in product, so they did things like sort garbage bags full of hole-punch confetti according to color when they weren’t working. They’d fixate on details, like sanding off matchbook strikers. They’d lose sight of the bigger picture, like the growing pile of dust and the errant sparks. The flash hit someone’s face or lit their hair on fire. They tripped over a bucket of acetone. One thing leads to another, another being the lab in flames.
The collected dust looked like anthills made from red dirt and glitter and was so fine it stained your fingernails. If you didn’t wear a mask, you’d sneeze blood.
“No more than a quarter ounce at a time should pile up,” I said.
“How much is that?”
“Twice as much as you have here.” I indicated the reddish brown pile built up on the worktable.
“How can you be sure?”
“You got a scale?” My patience was gone.
“You took our gear,” he said.
He was right, I had. Starting from scratch, my way or no way at all, with White’s backing.
The pause gave the impulse whisper an opening, and I struck a match. The pile flared into a plume of sparks and rotten smoke. The four of them recoiled like cavemen before their first thunderstorm. The flames die down within seconds. I normally wouldn’t be so reckless, but I had to make an impression.