Interfictions 2 (31 page)

"Fuck,” she said to herself, taking the wine from the bottle. “Was he thirteen when he wrote this?” Then she slept, dreaming of elephants in rivers electrocuted by lightning. They were trying to cross to tell the agent something, but she kept saying, turn back, turn back! When she woke, she took the tube out of her ear and shook it.

"Ah,” she said, then stared at the notebook. Then Roger called.

"Well?” he said.

"I don't know what to tell you, Roger,” she said. “It's really ... dense.” She rubbed her arm where she had attached the Taser. “I'm going to have to bring in a consultant."

"Who?” On the other end, she heard his apprentice scrubbing a floor and running a hose. Roger had good grandchildren, who went to good schools. He boarded writers-in-residence each year from his pool of readerly constituents. This year it was only one writer. He would not trust his apprentice with his notebook; she did his chores. The other Minnesotans in his complex, which used to be the Minnesota Zoo, tolerated him because he was famous.

"I'm ... not sure yet,” she said, although she was sure. “Don't worry about it. Listen, what is the novel about? Why don't you pitch it to me?” She laughed, uneasy. It had been a long time since Roger had had to pitch anything.

"I...” Roger stopped, and the agent could hear him fumbling for a drink. “That novel was really, really early. I was still working as a bartender, you know? I was still trying to figure out what I needed to do, find my own voice ... It's like I put everything I didn't want to become in that novel..."

"Wait, so it's not a thriller? It's not a Mick Solon book?” Mick Solon was Roger's prime character. Roger wrote series after series of Mick Solon books: Mick assassinating socialist governors, Mick putting newspaper editors on the rack, Mick breaking up Mexican farmers' unions that threatened the state. Above all else, Mick was money.

"Well, not really ... I mean, it has a character named Mick Solon, but he's not the same..."

"Not the same?"

"He's a bit ... mellower."

"Christ, Roger. What am I supposed to do with this? Will you please tell me what the fuck it's about?"

"It's about relationships,” he said. He sounded embarrassed, and a bit surly. “There's a failing marriage. I'm pretty sure there aren't any terrorists in it? But, who the fuck cares. You're my agent. I want you to fucking assess it and sell it. Maybe I could go over it again, add a political subplot, a liberal suicide bomber? Maybe one of the characters has an affair with a sultan's daughter, who's actually been programmed to kill the Republican senator to make sure tax cuts don't go through, because the taxes are going to fund restoration of the caliphate?"

"I don't know, Roger. It sounds kind of retro. Stuck in the past?” The Republicans shattered with the constitution, like all else, like every other party, every other public interest.

"Well, it is set in the past. I'm just thinking out loud here. Look, you're my employee."

"Contractor."

"Whatever. Just transcribe the manuscript and figure out what to do with it."

"Fine.” She hung up on him. Then she called the front desk. She was going to work harder for this 25 percent cut than she ever had in her life.

"Security detail, please. I need to go to Kinko's."

She met the concierge in the front lobby. He was in urban camo and had a silver bag slung over his shoulder like a purse. She didn't want to know what he had in there. He was pretty much a kid. He must have thought she was ancient, and she knew he was trying not to stare at the cloverleaf radiation burn on her cheek.

"All right, ma'am,” he said, unholstering his sword and turning its crank to power it up.
Ma'am
. “Follow me."

They put on their masks. She crossed her arms and followed him out the door. He walked a few paces in front of her in the street. The Kinko's was only two blocks away, but she didn't want to take any chances. She clutched the notebook close to her chest. It was dusk, and the clouds cast shadows over the rowhouses of Queens, in one of the few sustainable neighborhoods left in the old boroughs. Glittering dust swirled around her feet. She almost slipped on the gangplank, and a few bicycles nearly ran her over, but the concierge barked at one of the cyclists as he passed, and the other that followed got the message. From the Starbucks on the corner of Vine and Polk, a teenage girl watched them pass. The Starbucks window was about a foot thick. She must have been a viceroy's daughter, or a sphere-of-influence envoy, right off the dirigible from China. The agent felt sorry for her, for having to live in this shithole. Lord Manhattan and his revolutionary army could only survive because of the influx of humanitarian aid from Africa and Asia, most of which he kept. And the tourism—plenty of brisk trade to the vaporized sites.

"We're here,” the concierge said, moving toward the storefront, looking up at the sky for any security breaches. The gangplank was short by about two feet, so the agent did her best to pick through the mud, coal, and fish bones in front of the Kinko's. Her shoes weren't the best. The concierge gave her a hand. His arm was like a steel beam that she gripped tightly.

"Thank you,” she said. He opened the door. She was paying for that courtesy, too.

When she went in the door, she saw that the couriers were waiting for her there, next to the scanners. There was no point in running.

They let her scan the documents and send them to Amar, though. She was surprised about that. But they also said that an equal measure deserved equal measure. The courier she had Tasered was not there. The concierge thought about protecting the agent, but he was outnumbered five to one, and the couriers had these wiry, muscular bodies. And besides, they were under contract with Lord Manhattan, and he wanted no quarrel with him. He sheathed his sword.

"Stupid,” one of the couriers said as he held the agent down next to the paper cutter.

"You can hold her hand if you want,” another courier said to the concierge. The agent turned her head toward him, and her feet nearly slipped on the wet straw. She could see that he was contemplating leaving her there, and she started screaming and crying.

"What's got into you?” a courier said. “Hold still."

The concierge then took her hand, and she clenched it, dug her nails into him, to the point of almost striking blood. After that, she closed her eyes and could only hear their voices, and she wondered what Roger would think of her.

"Heat it up."

"We can't heat it up. Nothing to do that here ... none of these machines will do that."

"The bindery? There's a glue-heater on the top—"

"Fuck that. We don't have any pamphlets to bind. I'm not going to pay-n-pedal simply to sterilize an awl."

"Fine. Fine. I don't know if Marigold would really want to cause this one too much harm, though."

"She's not the best judge of that now, is she? She was stupid enough to get wounded."

Then they started arguing in Telugu.

Thirty seconds later the awl went through the agent's cheek, through the cloverleaf lesion, to the other side, scraping against her molars. Then she passed out, and the concierge let go of her hand.

Amar didn't know any of this. He was at the beach when he received the compressed files. His family was in the water, along with hundreds of other fathers' families. Roger's novel tried to download to Amar's wristwatch, but the memory constrictions were too tight. He had worked with the agent before in the past, regarding Roger's increasingly erratic hand at writing. The agent always thought of Roger's hands shaking when he typed or dictated his novels, but Amar never got that sense. He only saw the information at hand.

He squinted at the file name report on his watch—the sun was bright—looking for clues. The scanners captured words in their filing nomenclature before downloading the scans in full at Amar's home: BARBARIAN 20-35.ppgr, DEVIL-ROCK.ppgr, LUCY-IS-AT-A-BAR 450?-.ppgr. More unusual gems: Knives ... a kiss ... more devils ... a hill with a cathedra...

"Early draft,” the agent had punched into the scanner, with fingers she could barely control, her face bandaged like a mummy's. “Please."

Amar's youngest son, Prius, came running up the beach toward him, from the bay, waving his arms like wings.

"Watch out for the glass!” Amar shouted, covering his watch with his other hand so that his son wouldn't splash any salt water on its face, large as a saucer.

"I saw an eel,” his son said as he got closer, panting heavily. “But I escaped it."

"I don't think there are any eels in these waters,” Amar said, looking out at the bay. “And the lifeguards would kill them on sight."

"Oh, but there are!” his son said, plopping down on the edge of the towel and pushing his feet into the gravelly sand. Amar winced and turned his body so the watch wouldn't face his son.

"If you say so,” he mumbled, giving a smile. Looking at his watch again at a slant, with the file names cascading on the screen, he wondered whether there was a glitch in the transfer. Nothing of the Eighth Client's files had ever looked like this before. The enjoyable voices on the beach kept murmuring over him. Surely there were others like him here?

"You're not working, are you?” his wife said, putting a hand on his shoulder from behind. He flinched.

"You surprised me,” he said, looking down.

"You are working. Amar ... you need to take that stupid thing off.” She stood over him, blocking the sun, crossing her arms. He had met his wife at the Technical Freelance Armory, a few years after Mexico Moon, which in their vendor conglomerate's handbook was called the Strategic Reorganization of the Americas. She was in marketing services for a Bengali pharmaceutical company. She was shy but was finding her career voice over the last few years, after birthing the two children, traveling all over India and Africa to meet her production teams. She was a team leader in a way that Amar could never be. People thought he sounded like a woman on the phone!

"I really need to ... sorry,” he said. “Sorry.” He looked toward the bay, the spires of old Visakhapatnam out in the water. “Where's Puneet?"

"I thought he was getting rasgulla?” His wife looked back at the beach house, the snack bar, the Ferris wheel.

"No, no—he was with you in the water?"

"I wasn't in the water."

"He's swimming!” his younger son said. “Way out, near the towers."

"Puneet!” his wife shouted, running out to the water. Amar struggled to get his watch off, but the strap was caught on a hook. As he was fumbling, his mind drifted backward, into an undertow of time, and kept thinking: Why am I panicking? Is it because of her? Why is she panicking?

Back in the van—Amar was actually relieved that the trip to the beach was cut short by an imaginary emergency—Puneet was reluctantly explaining how he had been swimming out to the tower crowns to impress a girl. Who wasn't even Buddhist—his wife assumed, thinking out loud, working through the implications, because if this girl was Buddhist, he wouldn't have had need to impress her, on the breakwalls and ruins of the old port, because of their mutual understanding of their dual non being.

Puneet said nothing as they drove farther up into the hills, trees ripe with mango hybrids overhanging the road. Amar didn't dare venture into this emotional territory—he really couldn't care—of course, he was glad his son was safe, but he had no real doubts on this score in the first place. His wife also drifted into silence. But she had larger issues, which soon became clear after Amar glanced at his watch while driving. “I wish you wouldn't work with devils!” she said, looking straight ahead.

"Father works with devils?” his youngest said. “What are they like?"

"They're not devils."

"According to Nichiren they are,” his wife said.

Amar sighed and clenched the wheel of the van tighter. They had met at sangha within the technical college, chanting together. The sanghas were subsidized by the companies; after the Japanese diaspora, Nichiren Buddhism had found a home within the corporations of India. He found it as a way to get ahead, but she fell into Nichiren's teachings, more and more every year.

"We're not going to talk about that now,” Amar said.

"America is a poisoned land!"

"I've never met them, my beautiful wife,” he said between clenched teeth. “They're only contracts I have with them. Now let me drive."

That night, after his children and wife were asleep, he locked himself in his office with the novel. He had managed to survive the sullen hours after they returned from the beach—helping with dinner, chanting together for world peace, doing laundry while his wife helped Prius with his Mandarin homework. Sand was everywhere. Children on motorcycles sped by on their street, which his wife tut-tutted as she was getting ready for bed. Didn't their parents know this was a good Buddhist neighborhood?

"I can't sleep,” he said, sitting up after ten minutes.

"Amar, I love you."

"I know.” He kissed her forehead. The night sky was still. She was asleep when she said this. She would only say these words with such fierceness and warmth when she was dreaming.

He poured a Scotch—bottle kept in a secret drawer—and started downloading the scans from his watch. He had to enter the writer's world, and this usually wasn't an enjoyable process. It was never clear what an American writer was ever trying to say. Sometimes it made it easier to move the text along, toward a vision or instinct that Amar felt within the words, but sometimes this ambiguity was a dull wall, too thick to break. Tunneling underneath the text to the other side was the only option, but it was long and painstaking. This novel was, as Amar had feared, one of the latter cases.

If it could be called a novel. The beginning picked up in the middle of the action, in the middle of a dinner party. In a castle? Amar wondered if, perhaps, the agent had forgotten to send pages, but no—the author had clearly numbered each page of the manuscript with tiny, fastidious figures and dates, as if he had been trying to assert a timestamp control that was not there in the text itself: