Authors: Kevin Gaughen
20
“Daddy! I missed you! Where’d you go?” Octavia ran up and hugged Len’s leg as he walked through the front door of Salvatierra’s mansion.
“I had to do some work, but I’m back now!” Len said between coughs. “How have you been?”
“I’m sad! Mommy left me here all by myself.”
“She left you here all by yourself? Where did she go?”
“She went on the boat with Mr. Salvatierra. They were kissing. I think he’s Mommy’s boyfriend now. Mr. Salvatierra has a big white boat. Daddy, please don’t leave anymore!”
“How long ago did Mommy leave?” Len asked, not sure if five-year-old Octavia had enough of a concept of time to answer.
“Um, Mommy left when it was windy.”
___
_
Sara was the only child of two hippie parents. They’d raised her in an octagonal house in the woods of Vermont where she grew up finger-painting the walls and listening to the Grateful Dead.
To Len, who came from the grounded, blue-collar Rust Belt, Sara’s bohemian, intellectual parents had seemed impractical and batty. However, Len knew they were good-hearted people who meant well, and they’d simply tried to give Sara a better childhood than they’d had. Sara’s parents had grown up in postwar suburbia, with its valium-fueled consumerism and burdensome social mores. Do this, buy that; Jesus and the Joneses. So what’d they do? Having had enough of it, they decided to raise their kid their own way.
And they did. They raised Sara without rules, without the oppression of accountability, and without any black and white on right and wrong. That stuff was for squares, man—this was a groovy new experiment in child rearing. Sara’s parents allowed her to do whatever she wanted, and no matter how abusive or selfish her behavior was, young Sara never suffered any discipline worse than a feeble talking-to. If anything was the least bit unpleasant or difficult, her parents simply let her quit rather than requiring her to persevere. Sara spent her childhood being told how great she was, even when she wasn’t, because her parents were worried she might not develop enough self-esteem.
Len thought nonjudgmental relativism was a bad way to raise children, and he figured it was the reason little Sara grew into an epic turd. To make matters worse, Sara was physically attractive, which meant that once she became a grown woman and left her parents’ house, society continued her parents’ habit of forgiving her every bad decision.
Sara thought Len was one of those bad decisions, and the feeling was mutual. They’d met at a bookstore while she was studying art at a nearby college. Len was there buying a gift for someone when he saw her reading poetry at an open mic. Her poetry wasn’t that great, but Len found himself captivated by her self-assuredness in the spotlight. He stuck around and invited her out for a beer afterward.
Sara came across as rather serious and ambitious at first, which was what Len needed at that point in his life. After years of following his whims, from Japan to Iraq and everywhere in between, Len figured it was time to get serious and put down roots. They were married two years later.
After the wedding, Sara’s airs of propriety fell off like a dollar-store Halloween costume, and Len soon found out what she was really like. For six years, Len put up with her cheating, lying, and laziness. Sara refused to get a job, insisting her poetry career would take off. It didn’t, of course. Her poetry was terrible, and no one bought poetry anyway. Sara would leave dirty dishes and laundry all over the house and expect Len to take care of it, the way her parents had always cleaned up after her. She had the strongest streak of self-righteousness Len had ever seen. For someone so unaccomplished and morally vacant, she had a tremendous amount of contempt for anyone who wasn’t her. Sara harped on Len constantly, complaining that nothing he did measured up to her ever-shifting standards.
When Octavia was born, Sara found the grueling ordeal of parenting a newborn to be far more responsibility than she could handle. She never said it like that, always preferring to shift blame onto someone else, but Len had seen enough to know it was the case. So Len and his mother did what they could to raise Octavia on their own for the child’s first three years while Sara ran around the world doing who knew what with who knew whom. Sara’s abandonment of Octavia, plus her constant infidelity, led Len to file for divorce after six years of marriage. He’d had enough.
Suddenly deprived of Len’s financial backing, Sara decided she wanted to be a parent again and filed for custody and child support in the courts. As Len found out after paying a small fortune in legal bills, men had no custody rights in America. It didn’t matter how good a father a man might be, or how terrible a mother a woman might be; the woman always got custody, and the man was forced to give her child support payments, which was the way it had stood for the two years before they were all kidnapped. Len got to see Octavia occasionally, but not enough.
So here they were on this damned island. Sara was out on a yacht somewhere, using her charms to cozy up to a powerful drug lord while her kindergarten-aged daughter had been left alone in a house full of barbarians. Great.
___
_
As promised, the photos Len had taken, plus all his recordings and notes, were waiting for him at the mansion. Despite having very little energy due to the illness, Len wasted no time getting to work on the story he’d been assigned.
Two days after Len arrived in Ecuador, everyone in Salvatierra’s compound came down with the illness. All of Salvatierra’s men were wheezing, hacking, and laid up. Octavia was sick, too. On the third day after Len’s arrival, Salvatierra’s yacht docked at the long pier in front of the mansion.
Len watched from the front gate as Sara and Salvatierra disembarked and came walking down the pier, arm in arm. Her reptilian smile made Len feel ill at first, but then he couldn’t help but laugh out loud. They deserved each other, really.
“Hello, Len,” she said, down her nose almost, with a gleam of newfound puissance in her eye.
“Hi, Sara. Did you have fun?” Len asked acerbically.
“Of course,” she said, walking by him brusquely while Salvatierra gave Len a sidelong glance that disconcerted him.
As if they’d just gotten back from an asshole convention, Sara seemed to show little concern that her daughter was quite ill, and Salvatierra was downright furious to find his men lying in their beds with the flu instead of being at their posts.
Len went to bed that night still feverish, with a bad feeling in his gut.
21
Len awoke in the middle of the night. Not with a start, but naturally, as though it were time to wake up. He looked over at the digital alarm clock on the dresser. It was dark; the red numerals weren’t illuminated. A gentle breeze blew the curtains, and the full moon outside cast a gentle white light across the floor and wall.
Len’s mind felt hazy and placid, like having a head cold on a Sunday. He pulled off the sheets, walked across the room, and opened the door. The mansion was dark, but he could see his way around by the white moonlight coming through the open windows. Perhaps the power had gone out. He walked to Octavia’s room to check on her and found her sleeping peacefully like a little cherub. Len didn’t feel like going back to bed, so he decided to take a walk.
Down the hall, across the courtyard, into the great room. Len walked by several of Salvatierra’s men. They didn’t stop him or say anything because they were deep in slumber. Sleeping with their rifles, sleeping on the floors or chairs. The sea air blew gently through the house’s open windows, and Len felt it on his body. He had no shirt on. He heard wind chimes in the distance. Tonight was a good night to see the ocean, he thought.
Len ambled through the foyer, across the driveway, and stopped at the electric wrought-iron gate. The gate was closed. He remained there for a while, looking through the balusters. He could see the moonlit ocean beyond the gate, and he could hear the waves lapping the beach. The gate opened silently, smoothly. Len walked through it and past more sleeping guards down to the beach.
Len felt the cool sand between his toes, the wind on his face. The stars shone brightly. He walked down to the ocean’s edge and let the warm water rush over his ankles. He stood there enjoying the blissful stillness for a time, watching the dark infinities of sky and sea meeting. He turned to his left, and in the bright moonlight, he saw a large jellyfish on the beach. Poor thing had washed ashore, he thought to himself.
The jellyfish rose from the beach into the air. Leonard smiled. It floated toward him, then outstretched a long, thin tentacle, and placed it over Leonard’s head and down his back.
And then everything went dark.
___
_
On a little blue speck of dust somewhere in the outer bands of the Milky Way, a little meat robot stood on a little beach. The meat robot’s awareness, present since the womb, had somehow peeled away from its mental and physical processes, and it just stood there breathing and thinking like a machine with bellows.
The transient fiction known as Leonard Savitz—food that had been organized into sentience by ancient DNA, a little eddy in an unfathomably huge confluence of events that two parents were deluded enough to give a name to, a bullet suddenly self-aware in midflight and naïvely proud of its speed, simply dropped off. Nowhere to be found.
___
_
Space. The ineffable vastness of space. A trillion trillion glittering stars across the black enormity of existence. The equanimous, unborn eternity. A fully conscious universe had opened up to itself and returned home.
22
“Daddy, Daddy, wake up!”
Len opened his eyes. Octavia was staring at him from the edge of his bed in Salvatierra’s mansion. He felt daylight and humidity. The clock said 8:23 a.m. For the first time Len could remember, he awoke feeling totally rested and with no anxiety whatsoever. The illness had passed.
“Daddy, I think you were having a funny dream, because you were talking in your sleep,” she said in between coughs. “Do you want to go swimming with me?”
Len was amazed she had the energy for it. “Yes. Swimming. That’s a good idea.”
As they were walking through the house on their way to the beach, Salvatierra grabbed Len by the arm.
“Neith tells me you’re supposed to be doing some work for her.”
“Yes, I’ve been working on it. I’m just taking a break.”
“Let me know when you’re finished,” Salvatierra said sternly.
“OK.”
Octavia caught little clams down at the beach while Len thought through the situation. Standing there, looking at the five miles of ocean separating them from the mainland, Len knew he had to flee captivity with his daughter before Sara found a way to pillow-talk Salvatierra into killing him.
Within forty-eight hours of their disembarking from the yacht, Salvatierra and Sara also came down with the flu, which was a great relief to Len because it bought him a bit more time. By that point, Octavia was so ill that she didn’t even want to play outside. Everyone in the mansion was bedridden except Len, who was fully recuperated.
Salvatierra’s mansion had satellite dishes, and the large television in one of the living rooms was perpetually on, tuned to a US news network. When not attending to Octavia, Len spent the next couple days watching the news in amazement. It seemed as though everyone on the whole planet was sick—even the newscasters on the air were coughing and wheezing. Then, around the fifth day after his arrival in Ecuador, death began pouring through the screen like a tidal bore: heads of state, CEOs of major corporations, religious leaders, politicians, celebrities, business tycoons, high-ranking bureaucrats, famous lawyers, judges, and a great many of his fellow journalists. As if the achievement lawnmower were cutting down only the tallest poppies, the illness took victims of such prominence that it caused a name to be coined in the popular vernacular: the Success Flu.
It was eye-opening, really. Len hadn’t realized how intimately leadership and antisocial behavior were intertwined. Thing was, the Tchogols hadn’t gotten where they were simply through force or cunning; they were in fact shooed into it by the rest of the human population, because humans deeply yearned to be led by the unctuous and unprincipled. People
liked
being lied to and stabbed in the back, Len reasoned, because they confused it with strength. The average person didn’t trust the forthright or the noble because a person of principle would stop to reconsider their position, or jeopardize beloved traditions, or switch sides if they realized they were wrong. People were suckers for those who lacked introspection and who loved only themselves, Len thought, because they seemed to exude the confidence the rest of humanity lacked. That the Tchogols ran the world should have been no more of a surprise to Len than the fact that the rest of the world let them run it.
What did surprise Len, though, was who survived. The usual suspects—the slick, glib, polished talking heads who had presided over the news networks for decades—were all replaced in a matter of days by awkward, anxious people with bad hair. The traditional detached, narcissistic professionalism had been wiped off the slate and replaced with an overthought, cloying involvement in the stories. The rise of the Xreths, apparently.
News of Neith’s terror campaign dried up entirely. Perhaps she was waiting for the illness to weaken the government, or maybe she’d lost much of her own manpower. Regardless, with many of the world’s leaders in their death throes, Len wondered if there’d even be anything for her to fight against once the disease had run its course.
On the sixth day after he’d arrived in Ecuador and the eleventh day since Neith infected him with the virus, Len happened to be down by the water when a dodgy old Russian destroyer pulled up to one of Salvatierra’s docks. The vessel was so big that it extended beyond the length of the pier. Natalia and her associates disembarked. Since everyone else was too ill to do so, Len went down to the marina to greet them.
“Nice ride!” Len exclaimed.
“Len? You get around!” she said.
“I was beginning to think you’d never get here,” Len said, smirking.
Natalia gave him a quizzical look and chuckled. “I guess I am creature of habit.”
“And I’m guessing you’ve been at sea for a while,” Len said.
“Yes, I think since last time I saw you in West Virginia. I had to deliver this.” She gestured at the vessel. “Why?”
“Because you don’t look sick. Look, I apologize in advance.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
“Where’s Salvatierra?” She looked around. “Where’s everyone?”
Len took Natalia to Salvatierra’s bedside, where he slept, looking pallid and sweaty. Len took his leave to check on Sara, despite not wanting to.
Sara’s condition was getting worse. She couldn’t open her eyes and appeared to be hallucinating, murmuring something about her aunt. Len made her take some acetaminophen and drink some water. He sat there for half an hour by her bedside, thinking about the wrenching dissonance of resenting someone so thoroughly after she’d given him something as life-changing and beautiful as a child. How did a marriage end up like this, after he’d given someone his heart and sacrificed to give her his best? Worse, what if Sara was a Tchogol? The flu would kill her. Poor Octavia…
Len’s melancholy was interrupted by screams for help. He ran to the hallway, expecting an accident and instead finding atrocity. One of Salvatierra’s soldiers had pinned Natalia against the ground and was hunched over her as she clawed at him and wriggled to escape. The man’s pants were off, with his erect member sticking out at the ready, and he was coughing his brains out as he struggled with Natalia and tried to remove her skirt.
Len ran up behind them silently. “Hey, fucker!” he yelled before kicking the man full force in the face. The man, a hulking South American beast who outweighed slim Len by a hundred pounds at least, somehow wasn’t the least bit dazed. He sprang to his feet, then lunged at Len.
___
_
A funny thing about living in a Zen monastery: it could be rather sedentary. Hours of meditation each day. Len had to find ways to keep his muscles and ligaments from becoming stiff with the long periods of sitting. So three or four times each week, he and some of the young monks from the monastery went down the street to a judo dojo that was on the third floor of an office building.
Judo meant “the gentle way” in Japanese. However, a novice was quickly disabused of any hope for gentleness the first few times he was slammed to the ground and thrust-choked. Judo was about as gentle as a rabid gorilla; it was a nasty, bone-breaking, windpipe-crushing tool for ending fights quickly and brutally—and it worked.
No workout Len had done before in his life compared: grappling with a live, resisting human being who was actively trying to hurt him was, without a doubt, second to no other exercise. It was what we were designed for, he reasoned. It used every muscle he had, tested his wits, and put tremendous demands on his cardiovascular system. Len found the physical exertion, and the chess game of trying to wrestle an opponent into submission, a bit addictive. For his five years in Japan, Len practiced judo, making black belt just before returning to the States. The art was famous for its spectacular throws, and Len had practiced every single judo throw thousands and thousands of times in the course of his training. However, that was fifteen years ago, and he hadn’t trained at all since leaving Japan.
There was a reason people said a certain task was like riding a bike: the brain forgot things over time, but muscle memory somehow lurked forever. If someone had asked Len to tie his shoes, he could do it with no problem. If that person had asked him
how
to tie his shoes, he’d have struggled to remember the little story he learned in kindergarten about the rabbit going around a tree and down a hole.
___
_
Without thinking, without even realizing he was doing it, Len grabbed Natalia’s attacker by the collar and sleeve of the combat jacket he was wearing.
Len learned it like this, like clockwork, very fast clockwork: Step in between the legs. Then
kuzushi
, the unbalancing, an art unto itself: using your grips on the bad guy’s collar and sleeve, pull the dude upward and toward you to get him on his tippy toes, leaning toward you and unsteady. Look at your watch, they say, because that’s the motion you make with your head and arms. Quickly now, step in with your back foot so that it Ts with your front foot. Then the tricky part. Simultaneously:
lift his collar up while pulling down on his sleeve, as though he were a huge steering wheel and you were turning him—this forces all of his weight onto his front leg;
turn your whole body while still looking at your watch;
swing your rear leg back, between his legs, your hamstring lifting him off the ground by his crotch, using your own backside as a fulcrum;
still twisting with your entire body, still looking at your watch, end up 180 degrees from where you were originally facing; and
commit completely to the throw, letting your own balance go and letting your head go down to the floor if necessary.
Without an opponent or sparring partner, this all looked strikingly similar to the contortions a major-league pitcher made while throwing a fastball. When done correctly, the size of the opponent didn’t matter, because judo was all about the physics of leverage and gravity did the work.
Despite one and a half decades having elapsed, Len executed all of this flawlessly and fluidly, as though his last judo class had been yesterday. The result was an Olympic-quality
uchimata
. Adrenaline retarded his sense of time, and Len felt it all happen in slow motion. The man who had tried to have his way with Natalia flipped over Len’s body, his feet flying in the air, his big bald head ramming into the mansion’s tiled concrete floor, his neck bending at a cringe-inducing angle under the immense weight of his body. The rest of the man’s great bulk slammed to the floor, back first, with Len coming down on top of him and Len’s shoulder ramming into the man’s rib cage on the landing. The brute grunted as Len’s body weight came down on his solar plexus and knocked the air out of his lungs.
Ippon
, sucker. Ain’t no one getting up after that.
Having reacted from instinct and habit, it took Len a few seconds to realize what had happened. Blood was streaming from a gash in the man’s cranium, and his staring eyes were not moving. He was unconscious. Dead, maybe. Who knew? Len looked down at Natalia. Her eyes were wide with fear and surprise.
“Wow! How you did that?” It took a lot to shock a Russian, but apparently it was possible.
“Are you OK?”
“I think so,” she said, her voice shaking. “He didn’t get me.”
“We need to get out of here before more of them come.”
“Yes! Let’s go!” Natalia exclaimed.
“Wait, let me get my daughter!”
Len dashed back to Octavia’s bedroom, picked the sick little girl up in a fireman’s carry, went to his own room to get his suitcase containing the things Neith had given him, then ran with Natalia down to the marina. One of Salvatierra’s goons saw Len running and yelled to alert the others. On the run down, Natalia shouted to her Russian friends, who were lounging on the pier. As though they’d rehearsed a contingency plan on the ride over (which was probably standard operating procedure when one was dealing with Salvatierra types), the Russians quickly sprang to action by climbing back on board the big boat and scurrying to their predetermined posts. Natalia climbed up the ladder. Len handed Octavia and his suitcase up to the Russian crewmen, who lifted both onto the boat, and then Len climbed up himself. One of the crew cut the mooring ropes with bolt cutters, and the boat powered away from the pier.
As they were pulling away from the pier, Salvatierra himself, accompanied by several of his thugs, came shambling down to the marina. Salvatierra was swaying back and forth while carrying something big. Len strained to see what. A large tube. He was lifting it to his shoulder. A rocket launcher. Salvatierra’s other men shouldered their weapons, too. Wasting no time, one of Natalia’s crewmen, who was sitting behind a large, mounted machine gun on the foredeck, swung the big gun around and blasted the lot of them with a horrific shit storm of lead. Before they could even get off a single shot, Salvatierra and his men crumpled like scarecrows in a bonfire.
“What happened?” Len asked, once they were out of the marina and well past the island.
“Salvatierra said he wouldn’t pay for boat!” Natalia shouted in exasperation. “He told that fucking man to kill me, but maybe he want to use me first!” She spat on the deck in anger.
“What a bunch of savages.”
“The hell am I supposed to do with boat now?” she growled, apparently more agitated about not being able to recoup her investment than by all the violence they’d been through just minutes earlier.
“I don’t know, but you may want to think about taking it easy for the next week or two. You’re about to come down with the nastiest illness you’ve ever had.”