10
DONNER
A spaceship showered sparks from its ass. It jerked and shuddered across the cardboard set, swaying back and forth from black thread. The stars were glitter, glued onto velvet.
A drawn-out timpani roll. “Buck Rogers in the 25th Centureee!” Organ music, cheesy strings. “When we last saw Buck,” the announcer continued, “He’d just discovered that the evil Dr. Huer had invented an atomic disintegrator ray that would DESTROY THE ENTIRE WOOORLD!” A cartoon beam of light hit a model of the Earth, which exploded, showering the universe with papier-mâché.
The announcer’s voice dropped abruptly from its melodramatic heights. “But first, Solar Scouts, have you sent in your labels from Cocomalt, the most delicious drink in the entire WOORLD!?”
I hit a stud on the armrest. The show dissolved, clearing the Plexiglas divider between myself and the cab driver.
The hackie laughed. “Don’t like Buck? It’s the hottest with the youngsters.”
“I don’t get it, I guess. In my day, if a show’s special effects were even a couple years old, no self-respecting kid would be caught dead watching. Now, the cheesier the better.”
The hackie shrugged, the padded shoulders of his uniform bouncing. “In Buck’s world, there’s always a happy ending. Not like ours.”
I blinked. Since when did cab drivers talk like sociologists? Since when did they wear neat little wool uniforms with duck-billed caps? It didn’t matter. I was just grateful for the ride. Seven cabs had refused me when they got close enough to see what I was.
I looked out the window. Soot-encrusted tenement buildings and tarpaper roofs rushed past. Laundry lines, satellite dishes and chimneys. The autumn sun was bright but weak.
Then we were on the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge itself was pretty much as I remembered, although it was augmented by high-speed lanes in clear tubes that made me think of hamsters. Across the divider, vehicles shot past like bullets.
In the distance below the rebuilt Statue of Liberty sat, no longer the metaphor of a nation; instead, a melancholy footnote of greatness past. Her remade face looked different somehow. Pissed.
“Air’s clear today. You can see the guys up there,” said the hackie.
I craned my neck to the Blister construction half a mile up. The arching girders looked too thin to support their own weight, let alone a structure that covered almost a hundred square miles. I’d read that they started construction from four sides—Englewood Cliffs and Inwood to the north, Secaucus to the west, Bayonne to the south, and Flushing Meadows Park to the east, with the goal of joining in the middle over Times Square. The interior Manhattan segments had finished and gone online early. Money had its privileges.
“Fullerite,” said the driver.
“Huh?”
“The Blister frame. Actually, it’s a type of ultra-hard fullerite called aggregate nanorods. Harder than diamonds. The grid between each section is electromagnetic buckypaper. Two hundred fifty times harder than steel and ten times lighter. Can’t even see it during the day, unless the sun hits it right. Then it kind of shimmers.”
The guy was a regular encyclopedia.
“There’s two layers… the first was finished about a year ago. When this second, inside skin is finished, the project will be complete. There’s going to be a Joining Ceremony.”
I could just make out the ant-like shapes moving around. “Anybody ever fall?”
“Couple a times. But their safety lines saved ’em.”
“Don’t they… I mean, what about EM?”
“Gotta be close to a surface for it to work. You know, to repel, like two magnets.” He nodded upward again. “Most of the guys up there are Amerindians. Heights don’t faze ’em. They lose their balance about as often as politicians tell the truth.”
“What about birds?”
He looked confused. “They got wings.”
I smiled. “No, I mean, once the fields are activated, won’t this thing act like a giant bug strip?”
The driver grinned and bobbed his head. “Atmosphere, birds, the stuff we want, gets in. They thought of everything with this baby. Biggest construction project since the pyramids.”
A red light winked in the corner of the Plexiglas divider. “News alert,” he explained.
I found the “play” button on the armrest. Images of a violent riot surged onto the plastic. The sight of the combat-geared Surazal security forces made my stomach tighten. Dozens of them waded into a morass of young reborns brandishing signs and placards. “Free and Separate Reborn State!” “We’re Human, Too!” The digital audio was very clear. You could hear the crunch of baton against bone, the muted snaps as limbs gave way.
I hissed. “They’re unarmed.”
“This time,” replied the hackie. “Hard to tell all the factions apart. There’s the Enders. And the Secessionists. And the Cadre. The worst are nasty violent. Blew up a bus last week. Killed thirty people.”
“The Secessionists—they want all the norms out of Necropolis, want to establish their own state?”
The driver laid the meat of his palm onto his horn, objecting to a trucker’s driving skills. “Believe me, I’d oblige ’em if I could.”
“But—you sounded proud, a minute ago. The Blister.”
“An impressive cage is still a cage.” He took in my confusion in his mirror. “Brother, my clan’s been here for six generations. But things is way too fucked up to hang onto tradition. I’d take boring old Cleveland in a heartbeat.”
I couldn’t figure it. The New Yorkers I remembered would never have wanted out. Neither would they have allowed their city to be turned into a resettlement camp. Guess dead people coming back to life was enough to take the starch out of anybody.
We merged into downtown traffic. I watched One Police Plaza and the Courthouse zip by, looking just as I remembered them.
The cab pulled to the curb in front of seven-story Beaux-arts structure with a mansard roof. The vehicle settled, the light in my wrist flashed and I was sixty dollars poorer. “Thirty-One Chambers Street. Department of Records and Information Services.”
I got out, feeling dwarfed by the towering Corinthian columns standing sentinel before the triple-arched entrance.
I turned back to thank the hackie, but he’d already flooded the backseat with pink disinfectant steam and raced away.
***
The main rotunda was still elaborate and huge, with its marble staircase. The mosaic ceiling was still populated by deities and zodiacs. But the Municipal Research Center was now a tiny corner room nestled between a law firm and a juvie clinic called “Forever You.” The Hall of Records looked like an afterthought. Apparently, they’d subleased one of the city’s grandest municipal buildings.
Here, I’d looked through original construction plans for the Brooklyn Bridge, genealogical records from 1795, and the personal papers of Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. Felt pride at living in a city with such history. But now it seemed New York was no longer New York.
I entered the Hall. A radio with a little metal dog on the grill played “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else But Me.” The room consisted of twenty workstations. Smartscreens lay like silver puddles on each one. A teenaged reeb sat at the reception desk. Her name tag said “Arlene.” She looked up from her reeb fashion mag and treated me to a grin like the first day of spring.
“Hey there, playmate!” Arlene said.
“Uh…” I looked around. “Department of Records?”
“Bingo.” She touched her nose.
“So… where are all the records?”
“What’d you expect, hon?” she said, cracking her gum. “Shelves? Books?”
I sighed.
She grinned and waved a hand. “Aw, don’t sweat it, sweetie. Spend some time with your dickenjane and you’ll do fine.” She perused me more thoroughly. “I’ll give you the dime tour.”
She bounced from her chair and led me to one of the workstations. She pointed at the chair. I sat obediently. She slid another chair up beside me and leaned in to fiddle with the screen. Our shoulders touched. Her perfume was something sugary and soft. I turned and she looked directly into my eyes, only inches from my face. Not shy, this one.
She’d made no attempt to disguise her appearance. Her white pageboy tresses were curled under at the ends, and she was dressed in a Sloppy Joe sweater and powder-blue slacks. Damned cute, black nails and gold-flecked irises notwithstanding.
She pointed to the smartscreen, now floating at eye level. “Did you have computers in your pre-life?”
“How old do I look?” I said.
“Looks got nothing to do with it, sugar.” She smiled again, a blast of youthful good will. “Don’t suppose you got an interface.”
“A what?”
She pulled back a strand of her hair. A tiny tattoo of an old-fashioned plug connector glowed behind her ear. “Some kind of wireless device?” I ventured.
She grinned like I’d said something cute. “Close enough.”
I felt vertiginous. “When I died, our toasters didn’t talk back to us.”
She slapped my thigh. “Grade school stuff! Now, whaddaya need?”
I explained what I was looking for. Arlene blinked and subvocalized something. Seconds later, databases were springing into the air, replaced by others almost as quickly as they appeared. Information waterfalled down the holographic display.
“Bill Gates, eat your heart out,” I murmured.
“Who?”
How the hell could she not know about—
“Here we go. Now we’re cooking with gas.”
I watched in admiration over the next five minutes as she tightened the net she’d thrown out into the info-verse. Wonder if they’re still calling it the internet, I thought.
Then, abruptly, a single document floated.
“Oh, I’m good,” she said.
My heart stopped in my chest.
It was the Metro section of The New York Times, dated November 1, 2012. The headline read: DETECTIVE KILLED IN HOLD-UP. The columns of copy enclosed a photograph of Elise and me. I was in dress blues, fresh from the Academy. I looked ridiculously naïve. Elise was smiling, arm wrapped around my shoulder with that mischievous smile she got. I didn’t remember the occasion. Who’d taken the picture? Elise’s mother? Bart?
“Hey, that’s you,” observed Arlene. “You were cute.” I gave her a look. “Are cute, I mean.”
I gripped my wedding ring, tapping my forehead.
“Hey,” said Arlene, touching my arm. “Hey.”
(Special to the New York Times)
Brooklyn Detective Paul Donner and his wife, Elise Donner, were killed last night in Huan’s Grocery, near Lincoln Center.
According to police, Donner and his wife, a federal regulator, unknowingly walked in on a robbery in progress. Both were shot with a small caliber handgun.
Detective Jeremiah Kinderman stated that Donner was off-duty. “He was an experienced cop,” said Kinderman. “One of the best we had.”
The clerk, Hector Alvarez, 21, of Red Hook, was unharmed. Alvarez provided police with a description of the assailant, but as of yet, no arrests have been made. The assailant fled with an unspecified amount of cash.
The article went on to give a brief history of our respective careers and Elise’s work with the United Way.
Arlene whistled. “You just walked in on the guy?”
I shook my head mutely.
She nodded in understanding. “Wife’s not back?”
Jesus. A robbery. A fucking two-bit heist. And I’d walked right into it, like a goddamn rookie. Of all the senseless ways to go—
A chill numbness settled over me. Elise never went into those bodegas. She thought they were overpriced. So why…
Oh no.
I’d made her stop. On the way to the opera, I’d made her stop. And the only reason would be—
Oh no oh no…
So I could get a pack of smokes.
I’d gotten my wife killed for a pack of cigarettes.
The room’s angles changed. They seemed to be turning the room into a funhouse, how could that be, it was all weird shapes and colors, skewed, uneven…
“Honey?” Her voice came from miles away.
I lunged for the restroom. The retching came from my toes, wave after wracking wave of it. When it finally subsided, I splashed water on my face at the sink, rinsed the bile from my mouth. Little black pinpricks still flickered in the corners of my vision as I walked back to Arlene. She had a breath mint all ready for me. What a doll.
“Sorry,” I said thickly, sitting.
“Not every day you read your own obituary,” she replied. No trace of irony or pity in her voice.
“How do I get whatever records that exist? About… this?”
Arlene bit her lip. “You’re not supposed to focus too much on your old life,” she said. “It can be upsetting.” She looked at her hands. “That’s what they say, anyway.”
“I bet a smarty counselor told you that.” She didn’t reply. “Can you do it?”
She sat debating. Then she leaned forward, and her synapses flew.
***
A half hour later, we’d unearthed hospital records, pension files, insurance forms—the digital detritus of two people’s lives. Since Elise and I had died intestate and without heirs, our property had been auctioned off.
“Do reborns ever get their property back?”
“If it still exists, and if the heirs agree. Which isn’t very often.” She grinned. “Hearst was pissed. His own foundation wouldn’t give him back San Simeon.”
Bart had been right about my case. No follow-up articles. Nothing in the Criminal City Database. The file must’ve been tucked away with ten thousand other cold cases.
The screen returned to the Times article. “That’s it,” said Arlene.
That’s it. Dead end, for a dead guy.
Someone had gunned us down without batting an eyelash. Snuffed out two human lives, taken the handful of cash from the till and probably partied all night without a moment’s remorse. I’d seen it hundreds of times. I’d been sickened at first, this casual indifference to human life, but as the years wore on I’d grown calloused like my partners without ever really understanding. Now, my nerve endings like a nettle of black thorns, I knew what the loved ones of those victims had really felt. The bottomless depth of their anger, their loss. I’d counseled them with clichéd platitudes, so safe and naïve behind my badge. Let it go, I’d said. Move on, live your life. Give yourself time to heal. What pathetic bullshit.
Arlene was frowning at the holo image. She squinted at it.
“Weird,” she said.
“What?”
The image sprang forward, enlarged. She manifested a cursor and ran it down to the edge of the newsprint. “See?”
“See what?” I looked harder. “What am I looking for?”
She enlarged the representation some more. “Let me run an algorithm.” The image shifted into a blocky blur of pixels. Now parts of the image looked fuzzier than the rest.
“This has been digitally altered.” She moved the cursor back and forth between one line of text and the next. “It was an excellent job forty years ago. They matched color, highlight and shadows, but the resolution is a tiny bit different. It’s the section of the article about the robber fleeing the scene.”
“A last-minute edit before the paper went to press?”
“No, this is a scanned image of the actual newspaper, not some text version. The alteration had to have been done after the paper hit the stands.”
“Can I get the original somewhere? The public library?”
She forced back her giggle. “You’re cute. No one stores physical docs anymore. That’s what the Conch is for.”
“The what?”
“Ever hear of Carl Jung?”
“The psychologist.”
“He had this theory about a collective unconscious, a sort of psychic warehouse of racial memories. When the internet became self-aware in ’41, some smartass blogger nicknamed it the Collective Consciousness, since its core memories—its limbic system, you might say—are the stored data of humanity. We’re using it right now.”
The internet became The Conch. Question answered.
She puffed her lips out, made a raspberry sound. “This really gripes my cookies. Why would someone change it? How could they change it? The Conch is hack-proof.”
“I need my case file,” I said softly.
She swiveled to me, her eyes large.
“Know what happens when you try to hack the police network? Burly men show up at your door with morphinium handcuffs.”
“Besides, you said it’s hack-proof,” I added.
Her snort was so adorable that under different circumstances I would’ve had to bite my tongue. “I said the Conch was hack-proof. You think the government would trust its data to a sentient AI? No way. The government database is a separate system.”
“So it can be done?”
A wary look. “You’ve got ginger, baby, but I barely know ya.”
I laid my hand over hers. “You know me alright, Arlene. I’m like you. Trying to play a game where all the rules have changed.”
She stopped chewing. Her eyes stayed riveted on mine.
“It’s not enough, though, is it?” I continued. “Dressing like Sandra Dee, playing it safe, using all the right slang, staying under their radar.”
Her head lowered. Then she sighed and carefully affixed her gum to the underside of the desk. “I swear, I must be slack happy.” She pointed toward a door next to the bathroom. “This will take time. There’s a cot in the back room. You look like you could use it. When I got back, I was a royal bitch for weeks.”
***
Are you drunk? she says.
Hmmm?
I’ve crept into the bedroom. My head is spinning, and all I want to do is crawl into bed and drift away.
Go to sleep.
You smell like that damned bar, Elise says, sitting up.
I stop pulling off my shoes. It’s going to be a fight.
It’s part of the job, I say.
Bullshit! Coming home drunk at two AM is not part of the damned job!
Lone wolves don’t get promoted, Elise.
She isn’t buying it. She lies back quietly as I undress.
I’ve been going to meetings, Paul. Al-Anon.
Christ. You know what’ll happen if someone sees you there?
As soon as it’s out of my mouth, I know I’ve said the worst possible thing. Elise’s face breaks into jagged angles of shock and hurt. Then it hardens. I hate to see it harden that way. It’s been happening a lot lately.
I’m there for me, Paul. I don’t want to leave you, but I can’t stand where this is heading.
I take her hand. It’s delicate, like a child’s.
Look, baby. There’s got to be a way we can compromise.
That’s called denial.
Denial, I think. Goddamned AA. I’d sent many a petty criminal to them. But they were zealots. One way of seeing things. Everything was through the lens of their own addiction. And Elise had bought into it. Pretty soon she’d be telling me I had a disease.
Elise, I’ve never had a DUI, never hit you. I’m not one of those people!
You’ve never had a DUI? How many should you have had, Paul?
That stops me. Last year, on Van Dam Street, near the Long Island Expressway, I’d been pulled over for going left of center. I’d sweated blood when the officer had approached my car with a breathalyzer kit. Then I’d flashed my detective’s shield. The patrol officer had slowly nodded and stepped back from the door. But when he waved me on, there’d been disgust all over his face.
Does it even matter whether she’s right, I think? I can’t lose her. So I say:
What do you want me to do?
She comes to me in her satin teddy. She straddles me, settled against my chest, wrapping her legs around my hips. I can feel her heart beating. She’s warm from being under the covers.
An alcoholic can’t stop on their own. But you’ve never really tried, right?
I play it out. Ordering a Coke at Lefty’s. The other guys giving me shit. It’s not like it used to be. A lot of guys, the health nuts, don’t drink— Except who am I kidding? No one might say it to my face, but in this tribe, manhood was still measured by holding your liquor. Can I afford to slip in their estimation?
But that’s not it, is it?
I need it. There are times when the only thing that gets me through the day is the promise of that reward. I’ll stand in a bedroom in the projects, flies buzzing around the black blood, see the dead kid, smell the feces and the gun oil, and close my eyes and remind myself that by midnight I’ll be in Lefty’s and everything can go away. It’s all I have on those days when I feel like a janitor instead of a cop, cleaning up the city’s garbage. Our great citizens, the media, they don’t care. To half of them we’re the enemy. So why should I care?
What’s so damned wrong about having a little help, a little—
Crutch?
No. That’s not— There’s something else. A quieter voice inside whispers. There’s something, something I don’t want to look at, not ever. Something I can’t look at. Something…
I wrench myself back to her. I look into her eyes, see deep grief. I cup her face.
I’ll try, okay?
And if you can’t?
I try to smile. Then I guess we’ll know for sure that I’ve got a problem.
Paul, I have to tell you. I have to say this out loud.
I know what’s coming.
If this doesn’t… I can’t… I can’t…
I know. I get it, okay?
She searches my eyes for strength, for character, to see if I have the resources to do what I said.We’re at a crossroad.
I know you can do it, she says.
Hey, I say, How about I get two tickets to that opera everybody’s been raving about? This weekend?
She almost strangles me with her hug. Can we do dinner, too?
Sure, babe. Wherever you want. I kiss her soft lips and hold her tighter, thinking how I’d do anything, anything, not to lose her—
***
A hand was shaking me. I opened my eyes. Arlene was gazing down at my prone form. There was a mixture of childish amusement and very grown-up lust on her face.
“Sleeps like the dead.”
I groaned and sat up on the cot, abdominals cramping. I shook away the disturbing echoes of the dream.
Arlene puffed up her chest. “Wanna see how good I am?”
“Uh…”
She stuffed a data pebble under my nose. “NYPD Case File 03-1756. Robbery-slash-double homicide.” I bolted up and grabbed at it. Arlene snatched it back, spun triumphantly on her heels and marched back into the main room. I followed.
“It’s encrypted. It’ll take a day to turn it to English.”
“Sure you want to get any deeper into this?” I asked.
“We came this far, didn’t we?”
“Arlene, I don’t know how to thank you.”
She slid in close and gave my thigh a squeeze. “Listen, hero. My place is right around the corner.”
“Tempting. But I’m a little old for you, sweetie.”
She gave me a toothy smile and snapped a fresh piece of gum. “Old? Honey, I’m a hundred and three.”
***
I trudged up the steps of my building, my mind racing.
Why had there been no leads? The DA never rested in cop murders. It wasn’t a matter of vengeance—it was self-defense. The world had to know that if you killed a cop, you went down. Period. Otherwise, it’d be open season.
So what had happened? Where had my boys been? Bart? The Lieutenant? The case had closed way too fast.
Shot to death in a Korean grocery.
I saw it in my mind. Preceding Elise into the bodega, taking in the place in a quick sweep—the too-narrow aisles, the shrink-wrapped boxes of stock behind the counter, the coolers in the rear.
Anything suspicious and my radar would’ve gone off. So instead of stumbling in on a robbery in progress like the article said, it was more likely that our killer had come in after we were already inside.
I pictured Elise hovering by the door as I went to the counter. Saw myself digging in my overcoat for my wallet, perhaps distracted for a second as it got caught in the pocket…
… Then the figure smashing into the store, knocking Elise against a display of fruit pies, gun in his gloved hand, coked-up eyes blazing through a ski mask like twin supernovas…
… and I’d be turning, too late, already far too late, and then the sharp cracks, the stink of cordite, the shock on her face as crimson roses blossomed on her chest…
I stood shaking in my hallway.
Arlene was right. A little shut-eye. That’s what I needed.
It wasn’t to be. A message from Maggie floated in the air above my couch.
Meet me at Rick’s, it said.