“…so every day, two in the afternoon exact, two men enter, and at exactly three in the afternoon, two different men leave. Same at night, two in the morning and three. It’s hard to tell that they’re different – and it’s not just cause you white folk look alike – but they seem to be stylin’ their hair and outfits and everything to be identical.”
“Okay. So who are they?” I ask, intrigued.
“If we exclude the Matrix,” Steve shrugs, “I’m not sure.”
“Alright, so who’s driving?”
“We…don’t know,” Steve answers.
“Alright…” I think and they wait, “…tomorrow we buy a car. Get it reinforced.”
I don’t need to elaborate as they know what that entails.
Water splashes as Travis frantically touches his nose a quarter-second before Steve – designating him the involuntary volunteer – to which he responds, “Fuck.”
Travis drives us down a narrow back alleyway sandwiched by dumpsters.
“It took a shit-ton of tries to follow them. They always duck into alleys, singlin’ out any following cars. They always take a different way. They don’t always obey traffic laws, either.”
“How’d you follow ‘em here?” I ask.
“I just had Augustus order me a teeny GPS, coated it in somethin’ sticky—no jokes—and then I modified an ordinary pen to shoot it where I wanted. Got drunk and sat on the corner all night, waiting. Bing bang boom goes the dynamite.”
Travis pulls up alongside the back dumpster of a restaurant and points down the alleyway half a block, to a small office indented and sandwiched between the back of two larger enterprises. The appearance of a front entrance in a back alleyway isn’t uncommon but it gives the appearance of being shoddy. The door has a metal frame but glass front, adorned with a bold stencil:
ROBERTS & DUNHAM LAW OFFICES
A man in a white chef’s outfit stands on a nearby loading dock, smoking; the rest of the alley is desolate save the cars passing on the main roads.
“And that’s where they go. I’m pretty sure they never leave that building to go anywhere else. No food delivered, no clothes. Nothing. They walk in and don’t leave until they head back to the building. I’m thinking there’s an exit somewhere – there’s gotta be. The front street has a camera on it but this office doesn’t have a front-street exit and we don’t have the time to watch everyone that exits every building on this block. We got a camera over there for this alley—” he points at a nearby telephone poll “—and that was a bitch cause I had to put it high and I only had a belt to use and it chaffed my—”
“Just continue,” I tell him.
He rubs his thigh at the memory of climbing the poll.
“Anyway, we don’t know what’s in there, either. We don’t know…anything, really.”
“That’s not true,” Steve chimes in from the backseat.
After we dry off, return to our respective rooms (all adjoining), and change, we meet in Steve’s room; Travis’s room is too dirty, mine is too clean, and Augustus’s is too hot. The schematics to several buildings are already spread out over the bed.
Travis sloppily eats a hoagie while we talk.
“Keep that hoagie shit off the floor,” Steve warns.
Travis nods, his mouth too full to speak.
We study the blueprints laid out across the bed.
“We’ll name the buildings A and B,” Steve starts, “with A as the one across from the hotel since it’s our main point of interest. That’s where this Mans el-Ray Pasquale fellow was spending his time, not at building B – this fake law office or whatever it is.” He shifts several blueprints to face him more directly. “What we have is several areas overlapping most of the first floor of building A,” he points to squared off areas on each blueprint, “around this one area. Apartments on the second floor, top, top right over the pizza place, top left over the bookstore. Third floor top and top right are also for the pizza place – storage. Bookstore left, pizza place right. And between this is the void,” he lines the prints up as best he can, “so that there’s only a gap of…we’re talking maybe nine hundred square feet.”
“Alright. So what’re we thinking? We’re thinking basement, right?” I ask.
“We’re thinking basement,” Steve affirms, “or some structure underground. There isn’t one in the zoning records and we can’t see anything from the street but, yeah, I’m betting whatever’s there is in the ground.”
“And nothing goes in or out except two men?”
“Yeah…” Travis says with a mouthful of hoagie.
“No,” Steve says with an elbow to Travis, causing him to drop a tomato slice and look back, confused. They both look down at the tomato.
“There’s one other thing goin’ in,” Steve continues.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“It’s our way in,” Steve says with a smirk.
“Okay. What is it?”
“Coffee.”
A moment.
“Coffee?” I have to ask.
“Yeah. They bring a can of coffee in every other day.”
“And that’s going to get us inside?” I ask.
“Yup,” he answers, resolute.
HACKER++
“Before you go put yer shit away…” Steve says, handing me an identical plastic cigarette as the one Augustus had shown me. “This is the new Hacker. I’ve been callin’ it Hacker-plus-plus but…” he looks around, finding that mine is the only rapt attention. Travis is absorbed with his hoagie and Augustus is on the second bed, snoring softly.
“He’s been on the computer seventeen hours,” Steve informs me.
“Because of this?” I ask, holding up the plastic cigarette.
“Tell you the truth, I think he averages about seventeen hours a day so…no, probably not. But I guarantee it improved the quality of his work.”
And Steve gives me an abridged description of the compound Hacker-plus-plus:
“It’s odorless. Tasteless. Mist-based. Increases focus. Less R.E.M. sleep. Less anxiety. There’s no lag, no real physical dependency except that…when you stop, there’s several days where you just feel how much slower your brain works. It’s sort of like Flowers for Algernon but less severe – still, it’s depressing when you realize you’re going to be slower; however, it passes after two or three days and you just get used to it. Return to normal.”
“Bloughersperalgernin?” Travis asks with a mouth stuffed to the brim with hoagie meats.
“You are having a fucking love affair with that hoagie,” Steve says, half-joking and half-stern. (Travis tries to make a kissy face but it comes off obscene and sort of fish-like.) “And Flowers for Algernon is about a dumb guy that becomes really smart and then goes back to being really dumb. Sort of like you ‘cept without all that boring smart stuff in the middle…”
And I inhale cautiously on the end of the plastic cigarette.
There’s nothing – no taste, no smell, and no smoke when I breathe out; instead, there’s an odd sensation in the back of my skull that Steve immediately points out.
“Feel it in the sub-occipital, right? Man, I wish it was my first time.”
The feeling in the back of my skull is a cross between the way my head feels when I let out a much needed yawn, and the way my head might feel if it were to fall asleep like a limb without circulation, minus the pins and needles. The reaction is surprisingly different than the previous Hacker compound; this one is noticeably physiological. The lights grow bright as my pupils dilate and try to readjust. Only when my jaw unclenches do I realize how tight it had been clamped down and grinding.
Augustus stirs, opening his eyes to see my reaction.
Travis chews slower, momentarily distracted from his delicious hoagie.
Steve smiles.
“Go in the bathroom. Keep the light off, your eyes are gonna be sensitive for a few minutes,” he instructs, holding my shoulder as he guides me toward the bathroom. I hear him speaking, acknow
ledge his words, but there’s a lapse between my understanding and the understanding that I understood what was said, like hearing a mysterious new language that you don’t expect to know but somehow do.
In the darkness of the bathroom, door closed behind me, there’s a moment of silence while I clearly hear them in the other room.
“It’s a good idea,” Steve says to Travis.
Without being in the room, I can picture where he’s standing. There’s a note of something unusual in his voice, something as distinct as it is subtle – he’s confident in his statement but not positive.
“Fifty says it’s the snake scales,” Travis says, food falling from his lips. (I can hear it.)
“Fifty says it’s…the bark. Or metal. An element? Is that too broad?” Steve asks.
“Pick one – you can’t just have every element.”
And then it happens.
Alone in the darkness of the bathroom, there’s a faint blue mist in the mirror. When I turn to check behind me, I catch the mist – more like a glow – emanating from my right hand. As the dim navy blue climbs up my right arm, the left begins to tingle until it, too, emits a soft blue light; I wave both hands in front of my eyes, the blue glow leaving a smoke-like trail in the air.
It’s reflected in the mirror, as well.
The sensation climbs my chest to my throat and down both legs like bathing in an ocean of temperate air. My nose tingles at the smell of a disinfectant on the tub floor. There’s an odd, unfounded desire to bare as much skin as I can. With each article of clothing I discard, the navy blue grows in volume and mass until there’s a cerulean explosion that mushrooms out and twirls up like the flames of a bonfire. My elbows tuck in against my sides and bent, my clenched fists on either side of my temples. Every muscle tenses as I lower my head, both eyes closed. The feeling is wonderful, like crossing up, over a peak, then sliding down so suddenly that my stomach fills with the terror of free-falling, and I understand that I may not be able to control it anymore, understand that I’m uncertain if I can return from this. My body swirls into a roaring blaze of pure blue light, where every nerve smiles and every cell raises its fist in triumph – there’s a penultimate swell and, in one final, intense implosion, each pore drinks it, breathes it into my body, and the flames are gone as if in a vacuum.
And then it’s over.
Just me, out-of-breath, naked, and flexing in a dark bathroom.
When my legs step toward the switch, and my arm lifts to turn on the bathroom light, it feels as if I’m ensconced in a layer of muscle and skin that’s tough as Kevlar. I examine myself in the light of the hotel bathroom but – as I was confident would be the case – there’s absolutely nothing different about me or my body.
It’s over, passed, and I’m back to a relative normal.
Bit by bit, I gather my clothes and redress, exiting the bathroom to find a familiar room with flourishes I hadn’t noticed before. The left-hand curtain is ripped. There’s a quarter-shaped brown stain on the floor between the beds. Travis is on the first half of his second hoagie and I can smell that it’s Italian meats with vinegar and onions. Augustus rumbles with a low snore; he’s awake, though. I can’t put my finger on why I know it, just that I know it. Steve approaches to flash a pen light in my eyes.
“I’m fine,” I say, pushing him off me.
“Gotta check,” but he backs off, returning to his spot near the bed.
“What…what just happened?” I ask, equal parts astonished and serene.
“It was your brain reacting, shifting, repurposing. Physiological feeling tends to combine with a brief hallucination. You took longer than most. People only tend to have it for three or four minutes. You were on about ten. But it won’t happen again unless you stop for a month or two and then start back up again.”
Steve leans a bit closer, examining me from a distance.
“I’m fine,” I remind him.
“Okay. Well, from here on out, you only need a drag off it every twelve hours. The one I gave you should last about a week before you need a new filter.”
“Did you see scales?” Travis asks, holding off from taking another bite of his hoagie incase he has the opportunity to gloat.
“Scales?” I ask.
Steve laughs as my answer alludes to the fact that I didn’t.
“Like a snake. Scales,” Travis says, disappointed.
I shake my head.
“No, no snake. It was a blue light.” And I check my skin to see if it’s still there. “It was uh…intense. Like being a part of a raging fire, just…amazing.” Dozens of adjectives fill my head – some of which I’ve only read – but nothing can adequately verbalize the sensation I had felt, so I don’t try…
I just move forward with more focus and determination.
CABIN PRESSURE
“When’s your bro leaving?”
“He left last night,” David reminds Chris a second time.
He’s sprawled out on the back couch, nursing a hangover.
“I don’t think he said goodbye…” Chris says, hazily looking up.
“He did, you were just really, really disastrously hammered. You got my new number – call if you need me…know what, call when you don’t, too. That worries me almost as much as you needing me.” He leans in to Chris’ ear, startling him, and whispers low so Lizzy can’t hear, “And no smoking weed at all when you’re with her or driving. When you’re with her or driving,” he repeats, “got me?”
Chris nods in agreement.
“She’ll be fine, dude.”
Lizzy’s sitting one couch up, fully engrossed and flinging herself left and right to the video game she’s playing on Chris’ large television.
Kate is in the kitchen, nervously shifting her weight as she talks with Sadie. They are both such pale ladies, David notices, but Sadie’s red hair and tall stature make her look more ghostly, in a way. Kate, being shorter, always with dark-ish hair, has a soft glow, warm. They appear to be happy and their laughter comes rolling into the room every so often. Sadie gives her a big hug and a firm butt-squeeze.
“Cheeky bastard,” Kate laughs.
They peck each other on the lips, then Sadie picks up the two glasses of juices she had poured before David and Kate had shown up to say their goodbyes, gracefully carrying them into the living room.
Kate stays at the threshold, keeping a slight distance.
“Here you go, sweetie,” she says, handing one to Lizzy.
Lizzy pauses the game, takes the cup, and gulps down half. David stares at her a moment until she realizes her mistake.
“Thanks,” Lizzy says to Sadie, remembering her manners.
“Where’s mine?” Chris asks as Sadie aggressively nudges him to share the couch.
“I didn’t hear you ask,” Sadie says, sipping from her glass and smiling as she licks the juice from off her upper lip.
“Cab’s here,” Kate calls to David after peering out a front window.
David leans in to kiss Lizzy once, twice, and on the third time she growls.
“Alright, dad. Bye. It’s not like I’m never gonna see you again,” she says, grumpily, her eyes on the game.
“Right,” he says with a dejected look, “okay, well, I’m leaving…”
“Bye everyone,” Kate says, and everyone says it in return.
David takes Kate’s hand and they leave everyone watching the game. The cab takes them to the airport and there’s little hassle on their way to board the flight. David kisses Kate during the few times they are forced to wait, and she blushes each time; he tells her how it’s usually depressing when he leaves for these book signings since Lizzy can’t always come with him…but this time, he’s hopeful, even looking forward to it. As they wait for take-off, Kate elaborates on London a bit – describing parties and small, hidden clubs where she’d go to avoid the paparazzi; after the flight attendants explain the safety procedures, Kate asks David a question:
“So my mate Lily…I don’t have an’e sho
ws comin’ up and she’s go’a show in ‘bout a lil’ bit…” it’s obvious she had been rehearsing and waiting to ask this, “…an’ I’s won’erin’ – an’ I know, trus’ me, I know if you don’ wan’a do it ‘cause you go’a have to stay a extra few days – but I’ma join her on stage and…would’ja like ta join us?”
“On stage?” he asks. “What stage?”
“It’s a local venue – we got a few o’er mates joinin’, too. It’s for’a chari’ee. I don’ ‘member which, though.”
“Let’s…can we wait until we get to London, see how everything’s workin’ out around then. You’ll prolly be so sick of me you’ll regret having asked.”
She forces a laugh but David catches a quick look of dejection similar to the one he had after Lizzy’s goodbye. They don’t say much as the plane takes off. David’s right ear pops as the plane ascends but it isn’t particularly painful – more annoying, like someone stuck gauze in his ear. Kate sits on his right during the short flight and she glances over at him occasionally, finding him a bit more unresponsive than usual, melancholy even – he spends the short flight with his head back, deep in thought and staring out the tiny square window – but she dismisses the sullen behavior as a side-effect of leaving his daughter behind.
It isn’t until the drink cart comes that she realizes there’s a problem.
After the flight attendant gives three attempts to get his attention – each progressively louder – Kate nudges him and David jerks up, startled.
He looks around wildly, then up at the stewardess.
“Do you want a drink?” she asks.
He looks at her, puzzled.
She points to a soda and he shakes his head no.
Kate watches him open his jaw as wide as possible while rubbing his right ear.
“I can’t really—” he says in a loud voice, stopping to open his jaw wide again.
“You okay?” Kate asks, an inkling of panic in her belly.
He nods but the look on his face is unsure.
“I just think my EAR POPPED ‘CAUSE OF THE—” he’s practically yelling and Kate motions for him to quiet down. “I think my ear popped from the cabin pressure. I can’t…I can’t really hear anything.”
Neither of them speaks the rest of the flight.