“Can I help you?”
“Phil Erikson. Is he back from Iran?”
She nodded. “Is he expecting you?”
“Tell him Oscar Wendell is here to see him. He’ll be surprised.”
The secretary shut the door behind me. Phil sat at his desk, a huge oak thing buried in paper and junk, from which a single computer poked out and cast a pale green glow on his face. Somehow he had managed to find a clear spot in the mess where he could prop his feet up. I didn’t know what to expect. The unknown grabbed hold of my chest and squeezed, making it hard to breathe, because I’d half convinced myself that he’d jump over and punch my lights out—and I thought it might be a little deserved.
“Oscar Wendell. No shit. When Sheila told me you were here, I nearly freaked.”
“I nearly freaked coming over.”
“What do you want? We don’t have any jobs for you.”
I shrugged; it was a gesture I’d have to get used to again after not having done it in years, and I felt my neck muscles cramp. “Not here for a job.”
“For what, then?”
“I was an asshole.”
Phil grinned. It was all toothy, and I recognized it
immediately as one we all had used—to put our sources at ease, get them talking. He stood and walked around the desk, grabbing my hand and shaking it.
“Shit. It’s forgotten. We heard you got trapped in the Pavlodar encirclement and then we lost track of you. Didn’t know you’d made it out until Wodzinski called a few weeks ago.”
“Dan’s a good guy.”
“He’s an asshole, like the rest of us. Just hides it better. It must have been rough over there. Tell me what happened.”
And before I even knew what I was saying, the story spilled out. Everything except Bridgette and Sophie. When it came to Almaty, his eyes went wide, and Phil jumped back into his chair to start typing.
“They said nobody made it out of Almaty; you’ve gotta be kidding me. You were
there
?”
I nodded. “And then we retreated to Bandar. I saw the kinetic strike we used, the whole thing.”
“We heard about that. What did Bandar look like after the nuke?”
The memory of the women and children was so intense that the office disappeared, then returned a few seconds later, when I found him staring at me, waiting for an answer. “You OK?” he asked.
“Fine. Bandar was wasted, gone. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Phil stopped typing and leaned back in his chair. He lit a cigarette and handed it to me, saying something about how “no smoking” didn’t apply to him, and what were they going to do, anyway, arrest us? There were other words, a whole discussion about the new business of journalism, the importance of neo-holo, and who had died in
Kaz, but it was too late to pay attention, as my thoughts had drifted far away from it all, to Sophie and the kid, to Dan and the Brit. I wondered if everything was OK. Phil stubbed out his cigarette and coughed.
“You know, that last email from you pissed me off.”
I nodded. “I’m really sorry about that, wasn’t myself.”
“You still get high?”
“No. Not anymore.”
“Good. You and drugs were never a good mix. So what does an Oscar Wendell do now? What are your plans?”
I thought for a moment. It was a good question, and although I knew I’d head for Thailand, it wasn’t going to happen immediately, because there were still loose ends to tie. But what
would
I do once I got there?
“I don’t know. My father died and left me a bunch of cash, so I might do nothing for a while and just live. You know?”
“No. No I don’t, but it sounds good. Listen, you’ve been gone a while, and just be careful around the city. There’s that whole uproar about you guys and genetic troops.”
“What uproar?”
“Protestors. People afraid that they’ll grow genetics to do all our jobs, and somehow it got linked to anyone who was in the war. No offense, but you don’t look like a regular guy anymore. You look military.”
I started to feel sick, then angry at the thought of people so stupid that they’d think genetics would take over, or that it was somehow my fault. “That’s a load of crap.”
“I’m not saying I’m one of them; I’m just saying to avoid groups of people carrying picket signs, and to stay
away from the Pentagon—or any place near it. Just be careful.”
I finished my cigarette, sucking it down to the filter, and rested it on Phil’s ashtray before standing to leave. He showed me to the door. Outside, the cubes went quiet as we walked through, and it gave me a queasy feeling, like I had done something wrong, my mind spiraling as it tried to figure out what.
“They know who you are,” said Phil.
“What?”
“You’re famous around here. I think you may have even surpassed the great Dan Wodzinski.”
“But I didn’t even write any stories for you after Pavlodar.”
“Oscar.” Phil opened the front door for me and then stood in it, watching as I walked to the elevator and hit the button. “I’m not talking about writing stories. I’m talking about something else entirely. Why do you think I typed the whole time we talked? You
are
a story.”
By nightfall the rain had stopped, and I stood outside my apartment door, hesitating to put my hand in the bio scanner, for fear of what waited inside. I knew there wasn’t anything in there. But I hadn’t been back in years, and wondered if ghosts would rise from behind the couch to ambush me with reminders of what I’d left behind, and besides, once I closed the door behind me, I’d be alone. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been alone the whole time I’d been back. But until then, there had always been people around, in the train station, in Phil’s office, and during the hours after I’d visited him, when I’d wandered up and down
Wisconsin, trying to absorb the way everything had changed since I’d left, wondering if D.C. would ever “fit” again. Inside the apartment, my thoughts would be my only company, and there wasn’t any way to know where they’d take me left unchecked. Then again, I couldn’t stand in the hallway forever, because sooner or later someone would notice and maybe call the cops; I opened the door and went in.
A layer of dust covered everything and my shoes left dark marks on the wood floors, raising clouds wherever I stepped. Nothing had changed. Except for an enormous stack of letters, which slumped on my coffee table and spilled to the floor when I collapsed onto the couch, everything was where I’d left it—including the syringe. It rolled out from under the couch and tapped against my shoe, so I reached down and picked it up, pinching it between two fingers and unprepared for what came next. Cockroaches. They’d followed me all the way from Kaz, waiting for a moment just like this, and when I put the syringe on the table, trying to push it away, it didn’t help. No matter what I did now, the sight of the thing and the memories of its last use had opened the door to them, forcing me to cover both eyes with my hands and let out a moan.
Alone.
One by one the things crawled through my thoughts, dropping crumbs of remorse as they went, making me cry because my refrigerator was probably empty and there wasn’t anyone I could call to come over and talk me down from the ledge onto which the cockroaches had pushed me. I ran, out the apartment door and back into the street, so quickly that I stumbled over a homeless guy and didn’t even mutter an apology, the thought that I’d find a dealer and be done with it making me run harder;
only one thing was guaranteed to keep them out: getting lit. There were too many of the things, and if you couldn’t kill them, at least drugs would silence the part of your mind that screamed along, egging the things on and agreeing with every thought they evoked. I passed a hotel taxi stand and hopped into the first one.
“Take me to the Navy Yard—waterfront. Somewhere around there.”
“Wanna be more specific?”
“I’ll know when we get there.” I glanced at him and saw he had a tattoo, one I’d seen before, of a scorpion with its tail piercing the side of a tank.
“You were in Kaz?” I asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah. How long you been back?”
“Six months. I got out just before they hit Bandar.”
“Lucky for you.”
He laughed, but it was halfhearted, a kind of
whatever-you-say
laugh. “Yeah. Right. Sometimes I think it would have been better to just go out that way—quick, in a flash.”
The world evaporated, and all that existed then were the cab and its driver, grabbing my attention so that nothing else mattered, because he spoke my language. I
knew
what he meant. That was the instant when I thought maybe the Gs had something with this God stuff, because what were the odds that on my way to find a dealer, I’d jump a cab with a veteran, who took, who listened, and who summed things that shouldn’t add and made them fuse?
“Man,” I said, “me too. It’s a hell of a thing to say, but there it is.”
He laughed again, and when he looked back, I saw that his left eye was gone, covered by a patch. “That’s because it’s the only way to make it all go away. Sometimes. Other times you just have to cut slack and let it all roll over until those voices are too tired to keep telling you that it’s all a waste of time, like you wear them down with infinite patience until finally they just decide ‘fuck it.’ ”
The cab wove through Georgetown, angling down a slope and under the elevated highway so that as I looked out, I saw the scum settle off the Potomac in waves of foam, black from the glow of streetlights. And the bums. I’d never remembered seeing so many, and they stood at the water’s edge, looking toward the opposite banks as if maybe something more promising waited over there. It reminded me of the time on Lake Balkhash, men trying desperately to shed their suits and jump in before the plasma engulfed them, but these guys just stood there, resigned to whatever arced over to land in their midst.
“Those are us.”
“What?” I asked.
“Us. Ninety percent of those guys are veterans, just back from the East. The dirty East. And if you don’t get it wired, you’ll hang just like them, with no focus except on what can’t be anymore.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“They all want things to be the same way they were
before
they left, before the war. You know.
Normal.
”
I was getting angry. I wanted it to be normal again too, wanted to get rid of the roaches forever and heal the rot that had grown in my gut, working its way upward into my chest. It wouldn’t be long before it took over everything.
“There’s nothing wrong with normal. Everyone wants normal.”
“That’s just it, man.” He pulled over and flipped the meter off, sending the cab into darkness. “Normal is how we are now. You can’t go inside with a scalpel the way a surgeon goes in for an appendix, snip-snip, and then—voilà—everything is back to normal. To do that they’d have to wipe everything from your brain, rehab your soul. Normal for us now means getting by with the new guy, getting used to garbage that’s sloshing around inside us until it’s just another thing. Adapt to it. Because it’s never going away.”
We talked for another hour, and a couple of times the bums came up to the cab and he’d give them cigarettes, and both of us smoked everything we had. It felt right. The smoke filled the car so that it gave me the impression of being hidden in obscurants, safe from targeting systems as long as I stayed inside and didn’t move. I used to read a lot, and while sitting in the cab, I recalled an old article from the twenty-first century, some psycho-horseshit about how people with depression tended to smoke more, have a higher chance of nicotine addiction, and when I told the cabbie, he laughed; we both did. I mean, how could it have taken so long for someone to figure
that
one out? For the crazy and depressed, something had to have gotten them there in the first place, and the thing about nicotine was that while you smoked or chewed, it gave you something else besides the drug, something to do to
forget
what it was that had got you there. It gave you a thing to focus on, to pass the time with minimal thought, because for those brief minutes you had to concentrate on lighting or pinching, inhaling or spitting and just let it all
sweep in to repair the walls between you and whatever thoughts were trying to kill you that day.
Hell yeah
it made sense. And when you finished one cigarette or dip, you had to decide if you could hack things for a while, or if you needed another that very second, that instant. Sure, nicotine killed people. But for some, risking
that
was preferable to taking life completely straight.
By the time one a.m. rolled around, we were both tired, and he asked if I still wanted to go to the Navy Yard.
“Nah. Take me back to the stand where you picked me up. What do I owe you?”
“No money. Most of us are on our own, except for when we’re not.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything. When he dropped me off, I shook his hand and then walked the few blocks to my apartment, not hesitating this time to stick my hand in the reader. The place was still dark. But this time the syringe didn’t grab hold and I walked into my room, where the bed lay bare, because I had left it like that, with no sheets or blankets. Only instead of lying down, I moved it, just far enough that I could squeeze between the bed and the wall and lie on the floor. There wasn’t any way I’d be able to sleep on a bed. A floor was better, like the tunnels, and when I started sobbing, the only thing that made me feel better was the thought that in a few minutes I’d fall asleep, which was almost as good as nicotine or drugs—for making everything go away. The only problem with sleep was that most of the time you woke up, but that was hours away, and for now the promise of unconsciousness was good enough.