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Last Updated: May 9th, 2008 - 01:46:43 |
Excerpt: The Skulll Cage Key, By Michel Marriott
Chapter 23: Passages
"Wake… up. Wake up… Wake. UP!”
Army felt the shadows of the words fall over him, but their meaning was just out of reach. The drumming of tight, little fists on his exposed shoulder was far easier
to interpret: The time for sleep was over.
“Arm-mee.” A whispery coo begged his eyes open. No fists this time. “You have to get up. They’ll be here soon.”
Army’s eyes began to focus. There was the harsh glare of a table lamp and then the soft, dark oval of Oona’s face. He could smell her breath. It was sweet and musky like the scent of wild flowers blooming from rotting bark.
“Do you want some of this herb?” Oona asked. “It’ll help clear your head.”
“Nah, not this time. Trust me. It’ll just put my black ass back to sleep.”
“Your choice,” Oona said as she quickly stood up, sucking hard on a joint she was trying to relight. He thought he noticed Oona’s eyes pass quickly over his naked chest.
Army reached behind his head and grabbed his shirt, which he had rolled into a sadly inadequate pillow. He slept on the cot using his overcoat for warmth—but more importantly, to keep his cash close. He knew he was in a shack somewhere beyond the semi-urban fringes of Camden, New Jersey. Oona had slept on the other cot, the one she dragged each night across the shack’s flimsy metal door.
He still didn’t trust her. But he couldn’t help feeling grateful that she had gotten him this far, out of Harlem and seemingly away from the omnipresent eyes of the Department. But he knew he was hardly far away enough to allow himself to relax.
“You sleep okay?” Army asked as he bent down to strap his boots.
Silence.
He followed Oona with his eyes as he fastened his shirt. Her back was to him. She was looking out of the shack’s only window, an oily sheet of paper-glass that only confirmed that that it was still dark outside. In the hard light of the shack, he moved his eyes along the softness that he imagined just beneath her baggy slacks and shapeless sweater.
They had lived in the same one-room shack for about a week. Army gave free rein to his imaginings on how he would have preferred spending the time. His fantasies always began the same.
It was night and Oona was in her cot. She was naked. Army was incapable of imagining her in bed any other way. More specifically, she was naked and asleep on her stomach. Yeah, he thought, closing his eyes and letting himself fall more deeply into his fantasy. She was naked, asleep and the blanket was falling away to reveal the ripe-melon fullness of her ass rising and falling as she breathed, rising and falling as he slid slowly in and out of her. She’d moan and he’d sow tiny, moist kisses along her neck, along the chewy turns of her ears, along trails of goose bumps rising to meet his lips as he inhaled her, as he impaled her.
Army smiled as he felt his dick awaken and stretch a little at a sex fantasy that seemed unlikely to be realized anywhere else but in his head. Ever since the long car ride to Camden, their days were spent with equal parts preparations and boredom. Most of the time, Oona acted as if Army wasn’t even there. There were times when she would disappear for hours.
Nonetheless, he gave thanks that he was here and not in some Harlem alley, scared, cornered, and alone. Oona stood at the window, staring out through a silvery haze of cannabis smoke. At first, Army hadn’t noticed that Oona had turned the light off. There was something about her dark, upturned face catching the day’s fragile first light, the thinness of her wrists, her delicate fingers pinching the joint to her lips. It had all combined in inexplicable ways to recast her as something soft. Not the warrior whore he first saw from Kattrel’s hotel window.
“Oona?” Army ventured.
“Yeah,” she replied, turning to find his face. “Change your mind about wanting to lung down some of this good smoke?”
“Umm… no,” he replied and took a step closer to her. “What are you looking at?”
Oona smiled before turning her face from the window, which was beginning to glow smudgily.
“Nothing.”
“Really? Nothing?” Army took a half step then felt his nerve dissolve.
“I like the nothing, the stillness, out here. Really,” Oona said slowly. “It’s the spaces between things, the spaces between what’s about to happen and then… it happening. Those spaces are bigger out here.”
She paused. “It’s like these nothings hold big secrets, important secrets,
waiting to spring out, but only in their own time.”
“Yeah. If we’re patient enough,” Army said, almost too softly for Oona to hear. “Then you know what I’m talking about.”
Army smiled and somehow knew Oona sensed his answer without turning around to read it on his face. Oona waved her joint slowly under her face, air doodling its smoke trail before bringing the last of it to her nose where she sniffed it like a connoisseur might a fine wine. She glanced at her wrist for the time.
They could hear the heavy rumble of long-distance haulers pulling in and out of the brightening morning. Army had grown accustomed to going to sleep and waking to the noise coming from the trucking terminal across a wild onion field to the west.
Oona coughed up smoke as she turned to him. “You ready? We got a long trip in front of us—if you still want to come.”
“I have to come,” Army spat as he ran his hands through his knotty hair.
“You ready?” she asked calmly.
“I think so,” Army answered in kind as he slipped on his duster.
“Hungry? We’ve got about twenty minutes.”
“I could eat something.”
Oona opened her bag lying on her cot. She pulled two mud-colored wafers and two shiny vials from a flip pocket.
“Apple or Orange?” she asked holding the hyper-condensed drinks in her open palms while Army weighed his choice.
Before he could decide, Oona tossed him the apple-flavored Swoosh. Army watched Oona shake the thumb-sized container before carefully uncapping it. She tilted her head back and slid the vial’s opening from her fingertip to her tongue. With the container held tightly between her lips she yanked the pull-ring at the vial’s base.
Oona’s eyes bugged as her cheeks inflated into tight-skinned balloons. She held a finger to the wrinkled, brown circle of her straining lips. A couple of seconds later she began to swallow.
“Well, are you going to drink yours?” Oona asked as she wiped a few drops of orange Swoosh from her chin. “Sorry we don’t have any cups.”
“Huh, I, uh…” stammered Army, who had never seen anyone ingest a Swoosh that way.
He knew that once the three-ounce sports drink was opened, it was chemically engineered to mix itself with the hydrogen and oxygen in the air to reconstitute into an eight-ounce beverage. He was certain he would gag on the concentrate blasting down his throat. No way, he thought. “I think I’ll save mine for later,” he said.
Oona laughed, then explained that there was not going to be a later for a long, long time. She reached into another pocket in her bag and handed Army several tablets. She explained that one was an appetite suppressant, another a powerful laxative, and the last, a squared-shaped one, was a long-acting muscle relaxant.
“Don’t take the square one until I tell you to,” Oona warned as she gulped down the laxative and hunger suppressant. “If I was you I’d eat and drink something first. Take the laxative—that’s the brown one—and go out back there and shit your brains out. Before you come back here, take the white one. Then we’ll wait for our ride.”
“What about the square one?” Army asked as he munched nervously on a meal bar and eyed his apple Swoosh.
“You just watch me, and do what I do,” she said as she grabbed her bag and began to leave the shack to relieve herself. “And try not to embarrass me. Don’t act like you’ve never done this before. Hear?”
Army heard Oona’s voice trail off as she walked out and around the shack. He could see glimpses of her through broken seams in the shack’s plastic slat walls as she made her way to the edge of a littered field. He watched her stop and survey a patch of high grass and weeds before shoving her pants and underwear to her ankles and squatting like a Pygmy.
Army turned away, then walked to the shack’s window. With the sun up, he could see the transport terminal clearly. There were hundreds of haulers fueling, charging, and whatever else necessary, he surmised, for the vehicles and their drivers to traverse the Tri-Continent. He loved the idea of being able to travel like that, close to the ground, down where real people live real lives, passing in and out of different cultures as if you were no more than a warm breeze. Army was so lost in the idea of it that he didn’t hear Oona return to the shack.
She rapped on the paper-glass to get his attention.
“Hey,” she said brightly. “Take the brown tab and don’t waste any time finding you a spot. It’s really fast acting.”
Army shook his head, took a breath, then popped the tasteless, chocolate-colored pill in his mouth. Oona handed him a napkin pack as they pressed past each other in the shack’s narrow doorway. Army felt his stomach lurch so hard that he whimpered, “shit-shit-shit.”
“That’s the idea. Go!” Oona shouted and smacked Army on his ass as he bounded into the morning. “Don’t hold anything back,” she screamed before laughing like a giddy girl. “Get all your shit out!”
Under her breath she added, “God, please, get all your shit out.”
Alone in the basement library, ZaNia could not get enough of the story. Who, she kept asking herself, would cut off a woman’s head and then fly it like a flag over Times Square? There was something intriguingly medieval about it all, she thought. A head on a pike. A message? A warning?
There was surprisingly little about the incident on the Weave’s official knots and threads. Most reports dwelled on property damage and the dead and injured. Nothing on the identity of the woman’s head. ZaNia was most puzzled by the lack of a single mention of the retrieval of the head that practically fell in her family’s lap. It had sent them scampering like roaches under foot. She had no idea where Army was, but sensed somehow that he was safe. There were no Weave reports—even after repeated deep searches—of his arrest, hospitalization or, she swallowed dryly, his death. The same was true for her father and husband. Not a word.
She turned back to her work. She was calmer when she worked.
“You got to be kidding,” Imani said as she stood behind her mother. “Don’t tell me that you’re still on this chopped-off head stuff?”
“Good morning, daughter,” ZaNia chirped as she spoke to Iman’s reflection in her oversized viewpanel. “Your tea smells delicious.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Imani replied. “I’m trying a new one this morning. The Mother Maternal said it’s good for nerves. It’s an Arabian blend with a touch of vanilla cream.”
Imani took a long, loud sip.
“You found anything on Daddy and G-Daddy yet?” she asked her mother.
“Nothing concrete,” ZaNia said as she patted Imani’s hand that rested warmly on her shoulder. “I also haven’t found anything to make us worry, either. I know in my bones that they all are safe somewhere. Army too. Safe, just like us.”
ZaNia played and replayed three separate news threads about the Times Square head, each ending in a government censor block.
“Why,” ZaNia whispered, “would the government not want us to see this? Doesn’t feel anything like international terrorism to me.”
“I sweetened the tea with fish piss,” Imani said with a guilty giggle.
“What?”
“What?” Imani said as much as asked. She shook her head like a disappointed tutor. “You haven’t even been listening to me. You’re lost in this head thing, playing data tag with the government. It’s been almost a week and all you talk about is this head stuff.”
ZaNia turned to actually look at her daughter, a teenager on the verge of womanhood. She reminded ZaNia of herself at about the time she was accepted into the Harlem Heights Order of Maternals Number 3. After a short apprenticeship, she’d climbed into a birthing chair and delivered the first of scores of transgenetic babies.
Imani pricked the bubble of bittersweet recall.
“There are murders everyday, all over Metro New York. Okay, this head on a pole is a little weirder than most of them, but—”
“I don’t think so, honey,” ZaNia said patiently. “Look at this.”
Imani gasped when her mother brought up a life-sized, holographic model she’d made of the severed head. It revolved slowly, in full dimension, from her viewpanel. ZaNia explained that while much of the Order was asleep she had been isolating and enhancing the head’s attributes. A second head shared the viewpanel. This one had been significantly retouched. Lifelike color had been returned to its now taut, peach-colored skin. The wounds were gone and its grotesque expression rendered into a stiff-lipped smirk.
Imani took a closer look and pursed her lips. “Why’d ya make her look so stuck up?”
“I just followed her musculature,” ZaNia offered.
“Be careful,” Imani advised, putting down her teacup. “You know how carried away you get. I know you’ll find out who she is—was. But please get some rest, Mommy. Okay?”
ZaNia pushed back from the viewpanel and stood up to give her daughter a motherly embrace. She kissed the teenager on the cheek and whispered in her ear, “I promise.”
Imani hugged her mother so hard it hurt.
“Imani?”
“Yeah…”
ZaNia returned to her seat in front of the viewpanel.
“We’ll all get through this. All of us.”
Rikki was eager for the private medical attendant to pack up his instruments and leave her home. She was eager to speak with Mac\Sheehan and she needed absolute privacy before she could. She glanced at a hallway readout for the time. Another ten minutes to go.
The attendant had examined her mother, bathed her, fed her, and was now dictating a brief status report to Mac\Sheehan. Rikki looked in and noticed the attendant gathering his winking medical devices and carefully packing them away. Ah, he’s ahead of schedule, she said to herself. Eight long minutes later, the attendant summoned Rikki to the doorway into her mother’s room to issue the four words he always uttered just before he disappeared: “She is resting well.”
Yes, Mother was resting well. She was seldom conscious, and when she was she stared unblinking at the ceiling directly above her. After the first few days, Rikki had an overhead viewpanel installed on which Mac\Sheehan displayed endless streams of family images and vidis. Despite the pictures, Rikki believed that during the increasingly brief moments in which her mother was awake she saw nothing more than her life receding, like the party lights of a great houseboat drifting off into the night.
Her condition remained unchanged, each day a breath away from being her last. Rikki despaired that death would claim all the wondrous things her mother had been—her wit, her spirit, her love—all she knew, all she’d experienced. It would be gone. Forever gone.
Rikki wished she were wrong. She wished there might be more. But Rikki and her brother shared one inarguable thing. Neither had ever believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mohammad or any other invisible investiture of good or evil. They disdained any promises of heavenly rewards, celestial paradises, or reincarnation or any other beliefs that promised second bites at the wormy apple of existence.
Rikki remembered Reagan telling her, after a Sunday school teacher had made her cry with Biblical tales of devils and hell fires, “The only hell, little sister, is Sunday school.”
It was precisely 9 A.M. when Rikki gave the attendant a matching faint-smile-and-wave as her apartment’s elevator doors closed.
“Miss Rikki?”
“Yes, Mac.”
“I would like to confirm my noon shutdown today.”
Rikki looked bothered as she sat and leaned back into her overstuffed bamboo sofa. She swallowed hard.
“Yes, Mac. I need you to shut down for two hours—“
“If you need privacy…”
“No, Mac, that’s not it at all,” Rikki said, trying to smooth out the quiver that crept into her voice when she lied—even to machines. “I’m having someone over who gets nervous around, uh, home appliances like you. He’s a Holistic.”
“I know the discipline. Its members believe I’m an abomination because my higher functions are governed by Bio-Cybonetic Assisted Intelligence modules.”
“Well,” Rikki said, fascinated by the turn of the conversation, “some people think people are people and machines are machines, and they should stay that way—unmixed. Okay, Mac, I know most modern people have no trouble with accepting bio-cybonetics when they are implanted to, okay, keep diseased brains functioning properly. And, as far as I can tell, most people prefer having smarter cars, trains, viewpanels, games, and toaster ovens even if it is B.C.A.I. that makes them all so smart.
“But,” Rikki sighed, “super-smart machines like you make some people very uncomfortable, especially Holistics.”
“Do I make you uncomfortable, Miss Rikki?”
“No, of course not. You know how I feel,” Rikki said, sounding more defensive than she cared to. “I cannot imagine a day without you here.”
“Thank you. I will, of course, operate and monitor all vital household systems, but will shut down my conscious capacities.”
“Good,” Rikki said as she walked into her mother’s room and looked over the ashen little woman asleep beneath undisturbed blankets. “Put security on manual control as well. And place this conversation and all related conservations on this subject in deep mind lock. The password will be… umm… vanaskhuru.”
“Understood,” Mac\Sheehan responded. “Vanaskhuru.”
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