Ghosts of Punktown (17 page)

     But he had stored the programmed nanomites, not sure how he might smuggle them out of the company. Would they show up in a security scan? He thought of slipping a cartridge of them inside a lidded cup of coffee, maybe lining the interior of the cup with a sheet of material the security scan couldn’t penetrate. Stupid; wouldn’t this impenetrable mug then appear
wrong
to the scan?

     Now it was the fourth week, and more of Talane’s paraphernalia was gone, but Swift felt relief to discover the cartridge of programmed nanomites was undisturbed. He lifted the little, 1.8 ml glass cartridge close to his eyes. A grayish fluid inside, grainy and glittering, like water filled with the finest of metal filings. Thousands and thousands of creatures, not quite machines, not quite alive – but bearing whatever one could call the life of a human being, apart from the wet mechanics of their fleshly vehicle.

     Someone called to Swift across the warren of low partition walls and he looked up to see his supervisor Dave striding across the carpet. Dave was tall and broad, a bit brutish for a man in the field of science. He tended to be gruff with his male workers and ingratiating with the females, his style as subtle as a claw hammer in a latex glove. He had liked Talane a lot, repeatedly offered to take her for a ride on the hoverbike he favored in warm weather, manly beast that he fancied himself to be. Every man at work, every stranger on the street, had been attracted to Talane. Like many a miserable woman, she had been gifted with a kind of magical appeal, a wasted and unprofitable magnetism. Now, seeing Dave approach, Swift felt guilty for having been so jealous whenever he’d seen Talane speak with their boss, guilty for having accused her of welcoming his advances. How could he have imagined she would ever be charmed by this ass? But jealousy and insecurity are unreasoning things, and Swift could be very unreasoning for a man in the field of science.

     “When I told everyone today was 5S day,” Dave said as he loomed at the mouth of Talane’s work area, “I meant for us to organize our own work stations, not those of our fellow employees.”

     “5S. Oh yeah, that was today.” Swift had nearly forgotten. It was an ancient Japanese method of arranging work areas to minimize the wasting of time and effort. The 5Ss in Japanese were: Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu and Shitsuke. Camus Organics had adopted a set of forced equivalent meanings in English: Sort, Set in Place, Shine, Standardize and Sustain. Camus felt that promoting this philosophy would improve their workers’ sense of organization, or at least of alliteration.

     “I realize it’s difficult for you losing your friend, but we’re falling behind in our projects, here, especially now that we’re short-handed.” Swift didn’t like the use of “friend,” though Dave had not put any extra emphasis on it. Swift knew that he and Talane had been fooling no one by going far afield to visit the Scowling Buddha after work. Theirs had been a poorly kept secret.

     “Short-handed,” he murmured. “Yeah.”

     Dave nodded down at one of Swift’s hands, closed around something in its palm. “I hope you weren’t taking any more of Talane’s things. By the end of the week I plan to have it all properly organized and reallocated.”

     “All I needed was this nano remote.” He held up a tiny device. The moment he’d seen Dave coming he had slipped the cartridge of nanomites into the front pocket of his trousers.

     “Well,” Dave sighed, “if you really need it, but don’t take anything else until I can have Ramona go over all this.” Ramona Conte was their team leader. Talane had called her Aroma Cunte.

     Swift saw Dave poke a finger into his ear and itch vigorously. He had to fight back a smile. It couldn’t be possible, could it? Irritated with Dave one day, about a week before her death, Talane had programmed some “earwigs,” as she’d dubbed them, and left them on the leather biker jacket Dave hung on a rack in his office.

     Swift felt a warmth suffuse him, even as he felt his chest clutch with pain. Her influence lingered. It was like she wasn’t entirely gone.

3

     Ultimately, at the close of the work day Swift locked the cartridge of nanomites in a drawer of his own desk rather than smuggle it out of the building. At least he had taken that much incentive today. At least he had salvaged that much from her work area – and wasn’t it everything? Everything of her, in a 1.8 ml receptacle, less even than the ashes they had also given to her sister.

     “Is cremation Christian?” he might once have argued with her. He could argue about anything. “Or are you a Buddhist now?” Always poking and prodding at her inconsistencies, the hypocrisies, her flaws of logic, like an impatient scientist with a needle-tipped probe. The inconsistency that she would not divorce her husband though she claimed he was psychologically abusive, her hypocrisy that she would not break up with Swift even though she would not go through with divorce, the contradiction in saying that she’d been drawn to Swift because he was so unlike her husband, and then later turning around and saying he was just like her husband, doubting her, questioning her, pressuring her, so where was the logic in keeping two men like that,
and if I’m so bad then why do you supposedly love me, what are you doing in my bed right now, oh run away, sure, that’s all you ever do, don’t try to work out the problems in your own life, blame it on me, on him, you like to wallow in your misery, you like it this way, the world’s eternal misunderstood victim, you like to suffer...

     As he walked home from the subway, this internal tirade – remembered from no particular occasion; it could have been from any number of occasions – overwhelmed him and he had to pause as if to catch his breath. Swift squinted up into what he could see of the sky through gaps and chinks between the slab-faced towers. His tenement building squatted near the base of a massive apartment block, like a forgotten chunk that had dropped off the titan. He picked out his bedroom window, as if he expected to see the dingy lace curtain draw aside to reveal a ghostly white face peering back at him. The window gaped empty. He drifted forward again.

     He had agonized at her vulnerability. And so why had he also been so quick to abuse it? Now, with her gone – with her having again contradicted her religion, by cutting herself, carving her poor beautiful body, her white translucent flesh, like some seaman whittling a skate into a leering Jenny Haniver, a preserved mockery of a living thing – Swift found he understood himself even less than he had understood her. He reflected that he had always been better with the
concept
of people than he was with people, better at the concept of human interaction, of love, than in its execution. Uneasy abstracts that didn’t fit him the way they had looked in the catalog. Sometimes he had suffocated her, desperately lonely every moment he was without her. Other times, bitter at her confusion and indecision, he had felt she was needy and clinging. Then when he would pull away from her, or she from him, he would feel miserably alone again. There was no happy state for them. And yet after all their fighting and tears, they were drawn together again and again like kindred creatures.

     Until she had gone so far away as to never return.

     Except...except for the file she had left in her computer. Except for the glitter in the cartridge in his desk, the metallic angel dust that seemed to slither and move, and not just with its medium of water, if you stared at it long enough.

     He hauled open the tenement building’s metal front door, and it clanged hollowly behind him. Sparks were spitting from the elevator’s keyboard, so he bypassed it and trudged up the first metal staircase. Each footfall seemed to punch a key, release a jack-in-the-box memory.

     “You’re just selfish!” she’d screeched at him once, her heavy kohl running down her face in newsprint tears. “You think it’s all so easy for me, don’t you? You don’t understand how it is for me at all!”

     Was there something wrong with him, then, something fundamentally lacking? Had he been bereft of true empathy for her? Did he have the capacity for empathy with another human being at all? Or was that simply human nature, anyway, and the concept of empathy merely an unsubstantiated theory? Maybe that was what they should have been researching at Camus Organics. How to train their clever fleas to carry empathy to the human soul, and there weave it into the fabric with their nimble little claws.

     At the head of the stairs to the fourth floor, Swift turned toward his door and found the narrow landing blocked by a broad, kite-shaped figure. It was a Bliss, its punched-in eye holes fixed on him. It was the exact stare of the alien in the Scowling Buddha, but then these things all looked alike anyway, so that you couldn’t even tell if there was more than one sex among them. Still, the immediate impression Swift had was that this was in fact the very same being.

     “Excuse me,” he grumbled, edging forward and dropping his eyes from the thing’s face.

     It didn’t budge. It hovered there, as if uncomprehending.

     Swift looked up at it again, his glare playing over its body for signs of dart wounds. How could he even be sure? In the clinical greenish glow of the landing’s fluorescent lights, he saw that its snowy flesh was marred with countless scars, from apparent punctures to long lacerations or incisions. He thought some of them looked like cigarette burns. In addition, along its lower abdomen and cupped in its groin were a number of orifices of different shapes and sizes, most if not all surgically rendered, some of these ports lined with rubber and one of them trickling a clear jelly. Repulsed, Swift felt his impatience soar. “Get the fuck out of my way, will you?”

     Still it lingered, either not understanding or not heeding him.

     Swift surged forward, pushing at the armless creature with both hands, slamming its back into the wall. It made no sound, did not resist him or try to turn away. Stupid, Swift cursed himself. It wanted you to do that. It wants you to hurt it. It saw that in your eyes in the bar – that you had enough hatred in you to do someone harm.

     Maybe it had even sniffed the harm he could do to a lover.

     He wouldn’t give it the satisfaction again. Ignoring it, Swift punched in the code to his door. He muddled it, had to start again. Peripherally, he saw the otherworlder slide away from the wall at last and float past him for the stairs. It began descending, and he cast another look at it now that it was in retreat. Ha. The only thing he found vaguely human about it was that it had buttocks, small and hard like those of an Asian woman. Very white and smooth and not at all bad looking, if you could get past the rest of it. But that was a lot to get past.

     Swift didn’t wait to see it disappear down the stairwell entirely, instead turned into his flat and locked his door again after him.

4

     “Do you just leave injectors and extractors lying around on your desk like paperweights?” asked Ramona Conte. Swift started; he hadn’t seen her in the threshold of his cubicle. Aroma Cunte, Talane spoke in his mind. A Dacvibese let out a loud snore in the next cubicle over but the team leader’s lumpen, badly made-up face didn’t seem to register it.

     Swift glanced furtively at the instruments lying in front of him. “I’m still doing my 5S organizing. I’m not sure where to put them. It’s not easy to standardize each work area, Ramona, since not everybody here is exactly working on the same project with the same equipment.”

     “It just has to be
neat
; do you think you can manage that?”

     A strange, poisonous thought unfurled in Swift. That it wasn’t just him who had killed Talane, but – cumulatively – her husband, too, and every last malicious little soul-sucker like this person blighting his threshold. Ahh, but that thought was dangerous, lest he shift blame to more convenient shoulders. Yeah, that was just too easy, wasn’t it? Just too wrong.

     When he’d muttered something to satisfy her, and his team leader had retreated to haunt some other rabbit cage, Swift looked down again at the two devices lying before him. He picked one of them up, pocketed it, and slipped the other into a spot that might be considered in keeping with the spirit of 5S. If only everything could be neatly slotted into a labeled, designated space. Everything part of a puzzle, neatly integrated. Everything in harmony.