Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 22

Right. Well imagine such a machine operating on a global scale. Actually, you can't call it a machine, per se. Consider it a program, a system, a Rube Goldberg series of actions and reactions spreading outward from a central node. To call it a weapon would be too reductive. It was a device that set certain events in motion. The finger that topples the first in a row of dominos. Bickle called it the Rebooting Device, a technology designed to reconfigure the planet and bring about a new era.

What kind of era?

[laughs] He called it the Age of f.u.c.ked Up s.h.i.t.

Where was the device?

In a safety deposit box in a Chase bank in midtown Manhattan. Bickle gave me the name of the bank, the box number. I remained expressionless and didn't let on that I had the key. We continued our lessons. A month pa.s.sed in deep meditation. The desert heat pressed down on me and just looking at the world outside my head was like one long good-bye. Finally Bickle packed up his Hummer and left, promising that Kirkpatrick would return. I waited a day, then caught the first flight to JFK.

After years of living in the desert suburbs working with my hands, speaking to few people, in a sort of monastic haze, stepping out of a cab in Midtown Manhattan was like getting electrocuted. I checked into a hotel in Times Square. It was a Sunday, so I waited until the next morning to go to the bank. I arrived as they opened and asked for access to box #3487. I had to sign something, and when I provided my ID and signature, they matched the info on file. This seemed like further confirmation that I was supposed to be pursuing this particular path, like the dropouts had forged my signature ahead of time. In a room of bra.s.s-doored safety deposit boxes, I took the key that Erika had vomited up and turned it in the lock. The clerk turned his key, and I pulled out a box and set it on the table.

Inside I found a smaller cardboard box, and inside that box the device. It was a cheap video-game controller from the 1970s, a scuffed black plastic case with a big red b.u.t.ton on it. It looked like a joke. I wondered if Bickle hadn't sent me across the country so I'd leave the academy unattended. Maybe I was being f.u.c.ked with. I took the device back to the hotel and sat on the bed looking at it. If I believed it was bogus, some sort of prop, then it didn't matter if I pushed the b.u.t.ton or not. But if it really did set in motion the end of our times, then it mattered very much whether I pushed it. If I pushed the b.u.t.ton, it meant I wasn't sure whether it was real and I was only pushing it to find out. Pushing it was an admission of skepticism. If I didn't push it, on the other hand, then part of me really did believe that it brought about the f.u.c.ked Up s.h.i.t. Did it matter whether or not I pushed it? I thought of my dead parents, my sister. My childhood home swept into the sound on a tidal wave of mud. I paced the room. I was in a rock/paper/scissors stalemate. Belief versus disbelief versus curiosity. Had Nick really invented a remote control to end the world? Ridiculous, right? I had to get out of the room, so I walked through the tourist s.h.i.t of Times Square, mumbling the arguments for and against, blending with the human tide. Some subterranean part of me whispered that it was only a matter of time before I pushed the b.u.t.ton. I was going to push it! I talked myself down. I'd operate as though I'd never come out here. I would throw the controller in the East River and catch a flight home.

When I got back to the hotel, I realized I was starving so I placed a room service order worthy of a death row inmate's last meal. Plan was, I would watch an on-demand movie and gorge myself before I flew back to Vegas. After a while the room service guy arrived and pushed the table into my room. Young guy, with buzz-cut red hair. He positioned the table in front of the bed and started lifting silver domes off things, peeling the Saran wrap off my water gla.s.s. That's when it happened. My wallet was sitting on one of the bedside tables. If I'd had it in my pocket, I would have been able to take it out and give him his tip while facing him. But I had to turn around, my back to him, so I could reach it sitting beside the room service menu. While my back was turned, he said, "What's this?" and before I turned around I knew what he was referring to. My mouth was preparing the word "Don't" but not soon enough. I turned in time to see his finger make contact with the red b.u.t.ton and press it. The device made a solid click.

I couldn't move. He'd pressed the b.u.t.ton. The room service guy had pressed the f.u.c.king b.u.t.ton. He shrugged and set it back on the table. Then he handed me the bill. I don't remember signing it, but I remember him leaving the room, because he paused at the door and said, "Take care, Fly."

So there was this one momentous thing happening in my head, the pushing of the b.u.t.ton, and then there was the second momentous thing, the room service guy calling me by the code name the dropouts had given me. I had to sit down on the bed and think about what had just happened. I'd been played. The dropouts knew I'd be coming to New York to pick up the device. They didn't have the means to break into a bank, but they could plant a guy at a hotel to come to the room to push the b.u.t.ton. Outside, buildings remained standing. Manhattan operated as it always had, as far as I could tell.

How long did you stay in New York?

I checked out as soon as I regained my senses. As I walked to the ticket counter at Kennedy I had no idea where I was going until I slapped down my ID and asked for the first flight to Seattle. I was sure that by the time the plane touched down the world would be in flames. I found myself landing at SeaTac, grabbing a cab, going through these transitional moments like I was wearing a suit made out of an aquarium, the world outside of me blunted and m.u.f.fled and drab. I was in a cab and on a ferry, and in another cab. Then before I knew it it was night and I stood at the overgrown driveway leading to Star's house. I had no flashlight, I just felt along ahead of me with a stick, dragging my roller bag through the mud. When I got to the clearing, there was the shack and the shed and the unborn skeleton of the never-completed house. Suddenly, boom, I was on Bainbridge again. I had to catch up with the idea, like one of those online clips where the video speeds up to sync with the audio. As I was asking myself what the h.e.l.l I was doing here, the door opened, and Star's silhouette was framed in light. I came forward and found her looking exactly as she'd looked when I'd left. As if she hadn't aged. Same housedress, same hair in pigtails. If you looked at us you'd have thought I was the older one. My beard streaked gray, my skin creased by the Nevada sun. She beckoned me in with her finger like a witch in a fairy tale. And like a character in a fairy tale, I walked right through that portal into my past. The body odor/incense/oniony smell of a hippie house. We didn't say anything to each other. She took my coat and stuck my bag in a corner. Then I collapsed on the couch and fell into a night of hyper-realistic dreams. I dreamed I was a boy again, maybe ten years old, and it was winter. I was in the woods playing with Nick and we'd made a fort, really nothing more than a chair and an old step ladder we'd dragged under the boughs of a cedar. It was getting dark and I told Nick I wanted to go home, but he said he wanted to keep playing, so we stayed under the tree in the patch of bare ground while snow continued to fall from the darkening sky. I sat on the step ladder hugging myself for warmth and Nick sat on the chair doing the same. In the dream I faded to sleep and woke up in complete darkness. Panicked, I had to feel my way out of the snowy woods, stumbling along the path. When I came to the clearing where Nick's house stood, it was dawn, and I realized that I'd left Nick back there. But instead of going back I decided to pretend I didn't know where he was. The scene changed and it was quite some time later, in a different season, springtime. I stood at the edge of the woods while police with chattering radios recovered Nick's body. His skin was yellow and his head flopped to the side as they carried him out. Somehow the cops figured out that I had abandoned him out there and Star stood next to me, angry, shaking. I needed to escape the cops. They seemed distracted anyway, so it wasn't hard to slip away back into the woods. But now it was a different season, summer, and I was an adult, and as I climbed over fallen logs I had a conversation with myself about how I had just been dreaming that Nick had frozen to death in the woods. A dream within a dream. I heard traffic ahead and pushed through some foliage to find myself on a sidewalk in New York City. Behind me the woods were dense and dark, but in front of me cars and buses honked and squealed. Instead of buildings, a thick wall of trees rose along the sidewalk at my back. Like I was standing at a sort of membrane between two island worlds. I started walking downtown, toward Times Square. Soon I stood in front of the hotel I had just checked out of, with my hand finding its way to my pocket, where it found my swipe key. I felt like I was walking around in my aquarium suit again. I rode the elevator to the floor I had stayed on, walked down the hall, tried the key, and opened the door, overwhelmed with black, sticky dread. There was my luggage, the newspaper I'd read that morning, the device with the red b.u.t.ton sitting on the table. I was back, in a dream, in New York City, where I'd just been. I sat on the edge of the bed, thinking that this was turning out to be one h.e.l.l of a long dream. There was a knock and the words "room service" came through the door. I opened it and the same guy who'd pressed the b.u.t.ton earlier wheeled in another cart laden with food, and he went through the same procedure of removing the Saran wrap from my gla.s.s and lifting lids off entrees. I was locked into an algorithmic set of options, as if I'd rehea.r.s.ed; I reached for my wallet on the bedside table as the guy picked up the device, said, "What's this?" and pressed the b.u.t.ton. Exactly as it happened the first time. Except now I knew he was a dropout. But I was locked into the routine and couldn't do anything different with this knowledge. The b.u.t.ton got pressed again. And this time, in the dream, I went to the window to see buildings falling. When I woke up, I was in Star's house, but she wasn't there. In fact, she'd been gone for years.

NEW YORK ALKI.

The city's population swelled, drawn to its sh.o.r.es by viral marketing campaigns and rumors of epiphanies. Newcomers stood marveling at how thoroughly the first wave of inhabitants had adopted the personas of their ghostly forebears, circulating the blood of commerce and art through Chelsea, Tribeca, Wall Street, Harlem, Midtown. Newmans marched twenty abreast chanting conciliatory mottoes and welcoming these immigrants with promises of freedom from the stress of industrial production. Here and there a crime erupted, mostly human-on-newman violence, handled discreetly by those who'd absorbed the personas of New York's finest. Bald eagles careened over former Bainbridge Island, orcas nudged its seawall, and from the city's bowels screeched rats, subways, and data. The by-products of human folly seemed to have expired outside the parapets of this cathedral. Block by block the last vestiges of the former island trembled under the sky's robotic arms and joined the urban parallelogram teeming with offices and takeout pierogi joints, galleries, and gay bars. The more immigrants who arrived at this fever dream, the easier it was for a man or woman just off the boat to cast aside his or her former self and plunge psychologically whole into one of the diminishing number of roles doled out by the newmans. The rain-raked city strained under the weight of lost memories.

Woo-jin, lying on the master bathroom floor of the penthouse, head resting on a hand towel, succ.u.mbed to dreams once dreamt by Isaac Pope, which mainly consisted of endless lines of code with the occasional appearance of a Star Trek character asking for instructions on how to f.u.c.k. Woo-jin woke to a shoe tapping his wrist. He couldn't see the man's face from this angle; and the lunar eclipse of the heat lamp cast the face in shadow. The guy smelled of shoe polish and breath mints. He extended his hand and pulled Woo-jin up so that he could sit on the toilet. Then the man took a seat on the edge of the tub. Woo-jin tried to reset his eyes but the guy's face seemed to come out of an obscure memory.

"You're that movie star," Woo-jin said.

"That's right. I'm Neethan F. Jordan."

They shook hands. Woo-jin accidentally leaned on the flusher.

"You're Woo-jin Kan," Neethan said.

"Please don't hurt me."

"I'm not here to hurt you. Don't you remember me? We were both in the Happy Sunset Home together. When we were kids?"

"The group home?"

"Yes, the group home. You're my brother."

"I have a brother?"

Neethan shrugged. "Brother in the sense that we came from the same lab. We got sent to the home because we came out not exactly to spec. They had designs for all of us. Some of us came out different from how the recipe said we'd come out. I was a false negative. They thought I was a rough draft, but they made a mistake."

"Who is 'they'?"

"The ones who pushed civilization's RESET b.u.t.ton. They designed me to be a movie star. Made me a descendant of an Indian tribe that got wiped out even before the FUS. They made you, I don't know-"

"I'm a really good dishwasher," Woo-jin said.

"There you go. I played one of those once."

"Did you ever play a writer?"

"I did, yeah. Why? You want to be a writer?"

"I tried to write a book about how to love people but it fell apart."

"How do you love people?"

"I still don't know."

"Who does?" Neethan shrugged. "By the way, when I showed up they a.s.signed me the life of some homeless guy. You wouldn't mind if I crashed here, would you?"

The penthouse quickly filled with characters. While Woo-jin slept they sprawled on living room furniture and helped themselves to the pantry, uncorked pre-FUS bottles of port, and confiscated art off the walls. Mornings Woo-jin shuffled in pj's to the bathroom to p.i.s.s only to be sideswiped by Neethan, who supported on his arm a woman named Sarah or Kateesha or April, pleasant enough ladies doing their panicked best to adapt to the lives they inhabited in this fabricated metropolis. A cadre of filmmakers held court on the balcony drinking brandy from to-go cups and debating the methods by which qputers cinematicized reality. A chef arrived, accompanied by a woman with one leg, a horn section in search of a band, some cracked-out bike messengers, and a newman crooner who sang spot-on versions of period show tunes. A couple times Woo-jin woke to find socialites unconscious in his bed or the bathtub. Group sing-alongs at all hours, creative uses for whipped cream, a sink bloodied by some poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d's unfortunate encounter with a shattered highball. Various drugs rampantly traveled through the collected horde, with substances snorted, swallowed, injected, shoved into r.e.c.t.u.ms, and illegally downloaded. A shaman of sorts-at least he looked like a shaman-danced spastically in the butler's quarters in coils of sage smoke. Pots and pans clattering, someone going to town on a seven-piece Ludwig trap set, bowls of M&M's and newman-human genital interactions. Vomit, a.s.sorted. This was, Neethan f.u.c.king Jordan informed him, the party.

Every night after booklessly wandering the city in search of an agent, dragging himself through the door of his building, Woo-jin found his penthouse that much more infested with marauders high on one thing or another and their dogs and cats. Which made it all the stranger when he returned one night to find the penthouse fairly empty, just a man who looked like a fire fighter asleep facedown, snoring in the book-lined library. Then, from above, snickers. Woo-jin craned his neck to see that twenty feet up the usual rabble had ascended to the ceiling. Just kind of floating there like astronauts in zero-G. One young gentleman spilled his white Russian on Woo-jin's shoulder.

Neethan spun around the chandelier, brushing aside a couple pairs of groping hands, encircled by cameramen standing on the ceiling. "Woo-jin!" he called down, "Take a hit off one of those balloons and join us!"

In the corner, beside the biga.s.s FUS-era globe marked with graphic representations of fires, tornadoes, rogue glaciers, earthquake fissures, swarms of locusts, and the like was a bouquet of balloons with their strings tied to a paperweight in the shape of the Arc de Triomphe.

"What am I supposed to do?"

"Inhale the air inside it!" Neethan said. "Like you're doing a whippit!"

"Like I'm whipping what?"

"Just open the end of it and breathe in the air."

Woo-jin emptied the contents of a balloon into his lungs. Right away he felt a nagging absence of gravity. Some force seemed to pull his legs out from under him and he gradually rose to the ceiling, where Neethan looped an arm around him.

"How you holding up, buddy?" Neethan asked, half to the cameras.

"I think I need to start writing my book again."

"Go for it, buddy. Hey, can I get one of those mini pizza things over here? Get this-I met this crazy couple of university professors who happen to know a lot about my tribe. They're over there by the guy in the bear suit."

Cut away to the Vacunins pausing their zero-G heavy petting to pinkie wave at Neethan.

"I need to go home," Woo-jin said.

"For real?" Neethan said, pretend-disappointed. "Come on, no . . ."

"I can't write the book I'm supposed to write here."

Neethan nodded to the cameras. "You guys getting all this? Cool . . ." He lowered his voice and leaned in close. "Hey. Can you see me?"

"See you? Yeah?"

Eavesdropping onlookers chortled. Neethan lowered his voice, somewhat panicked. "Seriously, bro, I need to figure out what kind of real I am."

A rumble of conversation pa.s.sed through the floating a.s.semblage. Woo-jin caught pieces of it. Supposedly the messiah was near. "The king! The king! He has arrived!" Perplexed grins and bursts of laughter all around. A waft of combo hash-crack smoke. "In Central Park? Dude, I am so there." Someone, an actress maybe, wearing little more than a shoe, opened a high window and squeezed out to drift moonward in the night. Others followed, cackling, anxious for their chance to witness the messiah's return. Eventually the exodus left Woo-jin and Neethan alone, floating on the ceiling, while someone snored inside the chandelier.

"The messiah, huh?" Neethan sighed. "I was supposed to abort that son of a b.i.t.c.h."

Eventually they floated to the floor. Woo-jin walked in a circle to shake out his legs as gravity rea.s.serted itself. Neethan tossed cubes into a gla.s.s and poured something brownish on top of them.

"Maybe you'll find your people," Woo-jin said.

"I'm not a person, I'm a character. And I am fabulously famous and s.e.xy and wealthy," Neethan said almost sadly, then killed his drink.

"How should I get home to Seattle?"

"Easy. Just catch the Q from Fifty-ninth."

That night Woo-jin said good-bye to New York Alki, hopping on a subway just before it left the platform. Here and there folks crammed words into crossword puzzles or slept listening to iPods. After a time Woo-jin closed his eyes and let his head rock back and forth as it rested against the gla.s.s. Later, a sense of motionlessness woke him. He clambered out of the train into a deep darkness that confusingly revealed streets and houses. He headed toward the rivery car sounds and found himself on Aurora, Seattle's avenue of hookers, gun shops, and moving-van companies, then veered south as day broke over his left shoulder, the purple serration of the Cascades rising beyond the repaired and repellent city. Most of these neighborhoods were abandoned but here and there a house suggested the presence of a family sleeping inside, with mowed lawns and new shingles, vehicles glossy with dew parked out front. Aurora turned into 99 and Woo-jin dipped beneath the city and when he came out of the tunnel it was morning with seagull cries and the salty, creosote stench of the waterfront. After this brief view of the sound the roadway dipped under the dome and Woo-jin trudged through artificially lit Pioneer Square, stopped to buy a cookie, pa.s.sed the stadiums, came out on the other side of the dome onto Fourth Avenue, and crossed Lucile into Georgetown.

He expected the trailer to still be gone but there it was, parked in the spot that had recently been a patch of littery dirt. He stood numb from walking and blinked in the dust. After a moment the door creaked open, revealing a statuesque woman in a glittery silver bikini.

Patsy spoke. "Woo-jin! Where the heck have you been? Why are you wearing that stupid suit? Take a look at what they did to me! Oh my G.o.d, Woo-jin, they made me not a pharmer anymore! Check this body out! Yeah, that's what I'm talking about! They took off the p.e.n.i.ses and tissues and everything! Oh, my G.o.d I'm so hungry! Don't you tell me you didn't bring me leftovers to eat! Don't just stand there grinning like an idiot, Woo-jin Kan. Feed me! Feed me! FEED ME!"

Towels, water, rubbing alcohol, blood, gauze. Abby dressed Rocco's wounds in the bathroom of the apartment, tossing saturated clothes and absorbent materials into the tub. He murmured codes into the pocket transmitter then slept wrapped in a comforter on the couch while the Bionet went to work rebuilding tissues. Abby stood over him, watching him sleep, knowing that if she was going to kill him, it would have to be now.

Midway through the bread at their favorite Meatpacking District wine bar, Sylvie told Rocco about a ma.n.u.script she'd just accepted.

"I missed you," Rocco said.

Sylvie wanted to say she missed him, too, but that wouldn't have been entirely true. Part of her-most of her-didn't even know who the h.e.l.l he was. Some guy plowing his fingers through cheek stubble, considering the Malbecs. Who was he again? Oh, right, he was Rocco. She knew him? Yes, everything about him looked familiar. She antic.i.p.ated the eyelid flutter thing he did when he laughed. A script of possible behaviors whirred away somewhere cranial, and thinking about how or why she knew him seemed to disrupt it.

"I'm Sylvie Yarrow now."

"You're Sylvie Yarrow."

"I'm Sylvie Yarrow?"

"You're Sylvie Yarrow."

They ordered the Australian pinot noir pimped by the sommelier. The candle guttered, sending up a foul feather of smoke.

"If I'm Sylvie Yarrow, who are you?"

"I'm Rocco. Your boyfriend, remember?"

"But-"

"What is it?"

"My boyfriend is Bertrand."

"You were with Bertrand but you broke up. Now you're with me."

"I think there's something wrong with me. I don't feel like myself."

"Who do you feel like?"

"I feel like I'm between two someones. And where are we?"

"At the wine bar-"

"I know that, but more generally. We're in the city, right?"

"Have some wine," Rocco said.

"Seriously. This is Manhattan?"

"That's correct."

"The air doesn't smell right to me."

"You had nightmares last night. You kept moaning in your sleep. What were they about?"

"Who are you supposed to be?"

"I'm your boyfriend. Rocco. The nightmares. Tell me."

Sylvie quaffed red. "I was in a morgue. There was a coroner. He kept pulling out slabs. On every one of them was the same woman. Dozens of identical corpses."

"Sylvie?"

"I feel weird about you calling me that."

"All I've ever wanted for you is a happy life. Out of all the lives in New York City I reviewed, this one was the happiest. So I made arrangements to a.s.sign you this life."

"What do you mean 'a.s.sign'?"

"The world you've known isn't the world you're actually living in. Your name is Sylvie Yarrow and you're an editor at a publishing house. You live in the twenty-first century. You have an extraordinarily rich and rewarding life. Go deeper into this self. Relax your ego. Drift into this welcoming new person."

"I can't remember my real name." Sylvie squinted. "It's like a painful tip-of-the-tongue feeling."

"Can't you see what kind of heaven this is? All of it re-created just for you. You're free to live in this place as it was at the height of its glory."

The salads came.