GARTH STEIN
THERE IS NOTHING MORE REASSURING to Alexis than a moon in the daytime. Something about the palest white shard pinned up against the blue. Something about the swipe of the Sea of Tranquility. And now with the disc gone, with all the garbage gone, what is left? Nothing but Alexis and the moon, making quite a couple in the late morning.
Exhaustion seems to have seeped into her very bones, right to the marrow. Oh, she slept a few hours the night before, but the psychic toll has made her tired to her soul. It will be lifetimes until she recovers.
Downstairs, Otto is still being Otto. Ursula, Ursula. Nothing has changed. And yet the seismic rift in Alexis’s life is nothing short of catastrophic.
She pours herself half a glass of orange juice and fills the rest with mostly flat TalkingRain from a two-liter bottle that’s been lurking at the back on the refrigerator for who knows how long. But before she can put the glass to her lips and drink, the doorbell rings. The residents come to order. The house is alive again.
Otto looks at her from the front door, where he is standing guard by the peephole.
“Coppers,” he says. “A bunch of them.”
Alexis laughs and drops her shoulders.
“Let them in, Otto, I give up. Game over.”
Of course the game is over. All those things, those secrets about her father, about LJ and the accidental killing, are now hidden forever. All the players are dead, and she’ll be long dead before they can beat the information out of her, that’s for sure. “Let them in,” she says. “Tell them they can find me in the sea of tranquility with the man in the moon.”
She turns and goes upstairs, marches up the steps she knows so well with the worn carpeting that should have been replaced years ago, holding the banister that was not up to fire code—no, thank you very much—but always seemed to pass code when Edith offered up a little sherry to the inspector (don’t tell on him, please, he was a nice guy). She retreats to her apartment and waits for the knock that will signal the end of the end for Alexis. Foster care. Adoption. Who knows?
In the disgusting apartment, which has really gone to hell since her mother died, she turns on the bath. That’s what she wants. A hot bath. With little bath toys like she had as a kid. She wants a mom to wash her and dry her and tousle her hair, dress her up in her pajamas and snuggle her in bed. She can’t have all of that. But a bath. That she can have.
The knock comes. She opens the door without even asking who’s there. She knows.
“Detective Francolini,” she says. “So good to see you.”
Her mock smile vanishes as she opens the door. Hillary Francolini is there. And the other dude with the sandy hair—that must be Lou Rivers. But who are the other two? The Men in Black. Who are they?
“Are you dating?” she asks Francolini. “Or multiplying? What’s with the clones?”
But they are not clones. While SPD has its “look,” so do the feds. These guys look just a little sharper. Like they spend their slightly bigger paycheck exclusively at Brooks Brothers.
“Detectives,” one of the other guys says to Francolini, “I think this is ours. You run along now.”
“Fuck you, Chuck,” Francolini says.
“Hillary!” Alexis says, shocked. “Such language in front of a minor!”
“You’re not a minor,” Francolini says. “You’re a thirty-eight-year-old stuffed into a midget’s body.”
The other cops laugh.
“That’s derogatory,” one of the nameless ones says. “A ‘little person’s’ body.”
Francolini glares at him.
“Who’s got jurisdiction here, Chuck?”
“May we?” the guy supposedly named Chuck asks, and Alexis invites them in.
Well, Francolini and Rivers are actual real cops, and Chuck Dalaklis and the other guy, Lindquist, are feds, it turns out, once all the IDs are thrown on the table like guys showing their hands at a Friday poker game.
Alexis sits back on the ratty sofa. How quickly we adjust to our new circumstances, she thinks. A federal penitentiary or a state prison or a correctional facility for women out near Gig Harbor . . . does it matter what hell looks like when you finally get there? I mean, sixth level or seventh level or all the way down. Head facing backwards or being stabbed by demons. Dante was cool.
“Who first?” she asks.
Lindquist clears his throat. “We have no claim to your fate, Ms. Austin,” he says. “So in that sense, us second. But our local friends here with SPD—you know, we like to work with the locals. It fosters a degree of, well, work-togetherness . . .”
“Work-togetherness?” Alexis asks. “Um. School much?”
“Collaboration,” Chuck, the other fed, says. “Reciprocation. Back-scratching. You know.”
“We’re friends.”
Alexis snorts. “That would explain the mutual verbal abuse.”
“Bottom line,” Chuck says, “we get to chat with you a bit, and then we’ll turn you over to our compatriots, and they’ll take you into custody.”
And flush me into the toilet, Alexis thinks. Flotsam and jetsam (where’s Jim Lynch when you need him?).
“We need to talk about Robinson,” Chuck says. “He has information that we could use to clear up about . . . well, about twenty-four unsolved cases over the past forty years. If we could get to Robinson’s files, we’re pretty sure we could lock up about, well, twenty-five of them.”
“You said twenty-four,” Alexis says.
“The Fremont Inferno,” Lindquist says quickly. “And counting.”
“Well, officers, or, if you’re federal agents, I guess I should address you as . . . what? Your Highnesses?”
“Special Agents will suffice.”
“Right. LJ left me a computer disc. But it was a personal message for me. And if you can figure out how to suck my brain out of my ear, paint it onto a CD, and play it on your computer, you can have access to that information. Otherwise, the four of you can bugger off.”
The men look at each other.
“Feisty,” Chuck says to Hillary.
“I told you, Chuck. You know who her dad was.”
Chuck nods and frowns.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Ms. Austin. So, look, we’ll get the ram and take down LJ’s door and go get it ourselves. How’s that sound?”
“Get what?” Alexis asks.
“The laptop.”
The laptop. Right. On LJ’s desk. But what good would that do them? It was locked up and shut down with some self-destruct mechanism LJ had the clarity of mind to install.
“His laptop is garbage,” she tells them. “I tried it. He erased the whole thing. Done. Doesn’t work.”
Chuck and Lindquist laugh heartily. Rivers and Hillary chuckle like dopes, trying to be in on the in-joke. But these losers have never been in on an in-joke in their lives. Sycophants. Sidney Suck-butts.
“Here’s the thing,” Lindquist says, leaning in. He’s a leering one. Thin, bladelike skull, likely squashed into that shape by a horrible obstetrician yanking him into the world with a clumsy pair of forceps back in the day. Blue eyes that are too big for his head. And a dimple in his chin that looks absolutely horrible to have to try to shave inside of.
“Computers are like people,” he says, continuing his leer, head tilted ten degrees starboard and a little dot of spittle in the corner of his mouth. “Just because it’s been erased, scrubbed of data, wiped clean and killed, that doesn’t mean that traces of it aren’t floating around in the ether, you know? Like, a person dies. Sure, that person is dead, but there’s the soul, right? The spirit? Most people can’t see that stuff. But if you find the right talent . . . You think ghost movies came out of nowhere? Plato said we can’t conceive of something that truly doesn’t exist. So . . .”
“So?” Alexis asks, really not getting it. “Is this a history lecture or an interrogation or what?”
“So, just because a computer hard drive has been erased, doesn’t mean the right ‘talent’ can’t see what is on that disc.”
He sits back and nods at his comrades. Compatriots. The Man.
And Alexis has to admit to herself that it took her too long to really put the pieces into place. The puzzle was a tough one, because she had been working from the middle. If you want to solve a puzzle, you have to find the corners, then the edges, then you go for the belly.
The laptop. All of LJ’s information. All incriminating. All of it. They could pin twenty-four or twenty-five criminal acts on him, postmortem.
She’s brought back to attention by the sound of running water. Shit. The tub.
“Left the tub running, boys!” she shouts. “I’ll be right back!”
She bolts into the bathroom and locks the door behind her. Oh, shit. She was so where she was, and suddenly she isn’t there anymore. LJ. Laptop. Camera. Think. Think. Think.
She doesn’t turn off the water. She lets it overflow. Running over the rounded tub and onto the cool, old-style hex tiles Edith liked but probably didn’t really like; she realized how expensive it would have been to replace. And why replace them when the house would be torn down in a matter of months. Alexis opens the bathroom window.
Ha! Fire Code Man with the sherry! Ha! You are my new “The Man”!
The Fire Code Man at the time had required the installation of a fire escape on the outside of the building when it was converted from a funeral home to a hotel. So Edith’s parents had bolted an iron stair on the outside of the building, along the bathroom line, because all apartments had bathrooms and it was the cheapest way to go.
Alexis climbs out onto the fire escape and starts up.
Immediately, Habib arrives.
“I’m cool, bird,” she says. “Got steps. Humans use those. No need to go ballistic again. All is good.”
The crow caws at her. She starts down the steps and makes the top floor landing. LJ’s apartment. Ha. She pulls at the window. It’s locked.
“Crud,” she says. She looks around for a tool, but nothing is obvious. Now what?
She hears a strained caw and looks over the edge of the fire escape, and there he is—Habib, trying as hard as he can to get to her while carrying a footlong piece of iron pipe in his claws.
Oh, how he works!
“You can do it, kid!” she shouts. And that bird does do it. He brings her the pipe, which she promptly uses to smash LJ’s bathroom window.
Inside. What’s to get? Laptop. Camera.
Laptops are like people. They have souls. They have a lasting life. They have to be destroyed in the most incredible fashion, or they will live forever, a ghost stuck between the living and the dead. They will carry echoes through the dimensions.
She grabs them quick, stuffs them into a purple shopping bag from the PCC and makes for the window. Down the fire escape, she hits the latch, drops the ladder and is in the back alley and lands . . . well, when you’re on a roll, you’re on a roll. When things are going good, they’re going good. She lands right next to that damn pedicab she hijacked the night before.
I mean, if you could have seen this scene, you would have laughed. A fourteen-year-old girl busting out from an alley behind a decrepit old hotel on Capitol Hill riding a pedicab to beat all hell, and four dark-suited gumshoes running down the street after her waving guns and shouting and calling on their cell phones.
And she turns a corner onto Pine, and she is gone.
She takes out her cell phone and dials as she rides. The ride down Pine is fast when you don’t use your brakes, and she calls Linda.
“Honey, baby, sweetheart,” she says when Linda answers, “I need you.”
There is silence, but not discontent, she knows, because she doesn’t hear that beep-beep-beep of the phone being disconnected.
“I need you bad.”
“Physically, metaphysically, socially, or what?” Linda says. “Because Papa Bear has me on lockdown over here because you fucked up by running. Again. Pattern recognition will come in handy when you start your standardized testing for college.”
“I need you and I need your Bug. Cops are on me. One last time. I promise,” Alexis says.
“Yeah,” Linda snorts. “Thelma and Louise, Part Seven.”
“One more,” Alexis says. “One more and I’m done.”
There’s a long pause. “You know what my dad said to me this morning? He said to me, ‘That friend of yours, Alexis, is worth keeping.’ Do you know he said that?”
Alexis could hear the emotional edge in Linda’s voice, even though she was on a cell phone going nearly thirty miles per hour down Pine and about to make a screeching turn onto Third.
“LJ once said something to me,” Alexis shouted into her phone. “He said, ‘We can’t control the past, and we can’t control the future. But we can control the now!’”
Another long pause. Then, “I’ll be downstairs at the entrance to our parking garage in three.”
And Alexis: “I’ll be there in two.”
She’s got the Bug and is ready to go. Alexis parks the pedicab—ironically, not far from where she’d hijacked it. Return to sender. She gets in the Bug.
“Where to?” Linda asks.
“Tacoma,” Alexis replies.
“Tacoma? Why? Let me guess, you have an old family friend down there who’s a taxidermist and you want to have your mother’s body stuffed so she can forever live in the lobby of the Hotel Angeline.”
“Um. No. Just Tacoma.”
“Just Tacoma,” Linda mutters. She gets on I-5 South and they head down.
A black vintage Bug in the carpool lane is not hard to see. Not from freeway cameras. Helicopters. Cop cars. State patrol. It’s not easy to hide from other drivers who are seeing the Amber Alerts flashing on the overhead signs from Seattle to Tacoma. And it was never hard for the feds and SPD to identify when they saw Linda drive Alexis around in the past couple of days. The days of planting tracking devices in cars is over. The Man is truly everywhere.
These are the thoughts Alexis has as they drive sixty-eight miles an hour down to Tacoma, well within the “window” of radar guns. Oh, they’re good. They’re careful. But Alexis sees the Man everywhere. In cell phones. In Internet tracking. In digital TV boxes. Freeway cameras. The Man is everywhere.
Just like LJ said. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
We all live our lives, giving up our liberties at every possible moment out of convenience, never reading the fine print, never checking our credit card statements for trumped-up charges. The Man isn’t as insidious as LJ thought, but The Man has tentacles. The Man has reach.
She remembers Habib and his tribe going all The Birds on Linda’s stepdad. That was cool. And she remembers what they went after. The Chihuly vase was their first target.
Sure, makes sense. Crows. Shiny objects. Sure.
But don’t take that at face value. Don’t take anything at face value, LJ said. Jam your fingernails into the crevices and pry, even if it hurts. Even if your fingers start to bleed. Rip off that artifice.
They went after the Chihuly.
They went after the Man of the art world.
Think about it. LJ had been so mad when they took away those rides in the Seattle Center. The Fun Forest. “What kind of fun forest is it if there aren’t any rides?” he shouted at the newspaper.
“Do you see what they’re doing?” he raged at Edith and Alexis. “They’re starting earlier and earlier. They’re trying to crush our spirit when we’re younger and younger. Now little kids? Crush their souls to smithereens? Break their little-kid hearts? Smash their little-kid dreams and desires? What kind of bullshit is this?”
He was out of breath when he finished, and Edith had tried to calm him, but he was not to be dissuaded.
“It’s the goddamn Man!” he shouted. “They want us from birth! They want our spirit and creativity and joy. They want to strangle it!”
Alexis had been on the verge of tears at the table as he went on, as angry as he was at the Seattle Times article that talked about the bad Seattle City Council that was to take away the rides from the poor kids . . .
“And for what?” LJ demanded. “For a fucking Dale Chihuly museum? You’ve got to be fucking me!”
“Calm,” Edith said.
But LJ would not be calmed.
“It hasn’t even been decided,” Edith had said. “They haven’t even voted.”
“Oh, it’s been decided,” LJ muttered, exhausted after his rant. “You just haven’t woken up to the truth of it yet.”
So. Get in a Bug with an angel. Because that’s what Linda has been. There is no control of the past and none of the future. But there is control of the now.
So get in the Bug and go down to Tacoma and get it done.
They get off the freeway, do the weird circular thing you have to do to get down to Dock Street and find the Museum of Glass.
Linda parks in the garage and Alexis gets out with the PCC bag she’s been carrying. Digital camera and laptop and all their soul material in there, too.
“End of the road, girlfriend,” she says to Linda over the top of the 1969 perfect little Bug that clearly was too perfect for a regular Garfield girl, but Alexis never saw that. A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
“What are you doing?” Linda asks. “How will you get home?”
“Home’s done.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Hey,” Alexis said. “You said it yourself: This ain’t no Thelma and Louise. I’m going to do something bad now. You should probably get along. I’ll catch you on the flip side.”
Linda laughed loudly. “You sound like so many bad quotes from so many bad movies, I don’t know if I’d rather punch you or kiss you.”
“That’s from a movie, too!” Alexis said.
“No!”
“Rocky III. Mr. T and Rocky!”
“I hate you,” Linda said. “For real. What do you need?”
“For real,” Alexis said. “You’ve given me everything I could ever deserve. Go home. Come visit me in the pen.”
Linda reached her hand across the top of the car, and Alexis, a bit shorter, stood up on the rocker panel and touched Linda’s fingers.
“I’ll get a ride home with the cops. You’d better get out of here,” Alexis said. She closed her car door, turned, and ran off into the garage toward the elevator.
The Glass Museum has a Hot Shop with two furnaces, both of which run twenty-four hours a day at 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit. (If you have the pleasure of using one of their glory holes, you can get it up to three thousand degrees!)
Every day, all day, glass workers do their thing in the pit, using their long staves and crimper tools and blowing tubes to create works of art, masterpieces—shiny, colorful glass balls that are worth thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.
Glass. Which isn’t even a solid object, LJ had told Alexis once. It’s a liquid. They determined this when studying the famous stained-glass work of fifteenth-century Italy. The glass drips—albeit very slowly—and pools near the bottom of the panes. So if you measure the thickness of the glass near the top of a pane, it is significantly thinner than at the bottom of the pane.
She sits in the gallery of the Hot Shop and watches them work. And you know, it isn’t all bad. These artists have talent, she knows. But there is still something she has to do.
Her final homage to LJ.
He was crazy. He was wacko. But he was her LJ. She owes him one last protest. One last acting out. The one where he ended up with a shard of glass in his throat doesn’t count. He gets credit for that. He gets a redo.
She hopes it will be a gesture, and nothing more. She hopes it won’t blow anything up or break anything, or make anyone’s life impossible. But she has to do it.
When the show is over, when the crowds have filed out, she makes her way to the doors that lead to the floor of the Hot Shop. Fortunately for her, the guard they have on duty is a kid only a bit older than she is, swimming in a shirt made for a man.
“I’m going to meet Dale,” she says to him, pushing for the door.
“Dale isn’t here,” he says. “That’s Preston.”
“Preston?” Alexis asks. She looks around and sees a poster on the wall with a notice about Preston Singletary doing his glasswork that day.
“I’m going to meet Preston, I said,” she said with a nervous laugh. “What did you think?”
“You know him?”
She leaned in. “I’m his niece!”
“Oh!” he recoiled. “He’s a great guy. Nice to meet you. He’s really great. Tell him I said I’m a big fan!”
Crap, she thought, heading out onto the Hot Shop floor, the thing with boys is they’re so easy to manipulate. It’s almost no fun.
The heat on the floor is intense. The fires are raging. Workers are hustling about, this way and that, finishing things, putting away tools, cleaning up after the public display. It’s easy for her to get lost in the bustle. She makes her way to the fiery opening of one of the furnaces. She reaches into her bag.
“Who are you with?” comes a voice from behind her.
She turns quickly. A carbuncular young man holding a long pole approaches.
“Preston,” she says.
“You know Preston?”
“Niece.”
“Ah,” the boy says. “He’s right over there.”
He points, and a dude looks up from his work, heavy gloves on, safety glasses, gray hair swept back. “Hey!” he says.
“Hey, Uncle Preston!” Alexis calls out, and when the young man near her turns to look, to see whether or not there is recognition, she snatches the laptop and the camera from the PCC bag and tosses them into the fiery furnace.
“Oh, shit,” the young man with the pole says, seeing what she has done, seeing the fire, the rage of the furnace, the colors, the sparks, the death and consummation of a computerized soul.
“Fire in the hole!” he shouts, and suddenly levers are pulled, fire alarms go off, and the entire giant auditorium of the Hot Shop is engulfed in a Halon fog—white dust everywhere—and they are lost, so none of them can see each other. None of them can see their own hands.
Minutes, seconds, how long? How do we measure? But Alexis is running. She is running out of the building and they are chasing. Shouting at her. Boys with long metal spears. Guards with hands at their hips as if they had guns when they really have only pepper spray. They are all chasing her as she bolts out of the museum doors and across the plaza and onto the Bridge of Glass.
It’s late afternoon and the sun hits the colorful glass just so and the fragments of light dance before her. She sees them like a rainbow. If only to find the end.
But there is no prize at the end of the rainbow. There never is.
There is a squad car at the end of the rainbow.
She stops mid-bridge. Two flashing Pierce County police cars blocking her egress. She looks back and sees them coming. Security guards with their bellies flopping over their belts. Young artists with their spears of glass. Interested onlookers. They are all there. So she stops and waits for them.
This ain’t no Thelma and Louise, she thinks, looking over the side of yet another bridge and pondering the ramifications of a daring leap. But the bridge is only high enough to break her ankles if she jumped.
They meet her. Rivers, and Hillary and Lindquist and the other one who kind of scared her. Dalaklis.
She has nothing more. But LJ’s soul has certainly been released. There is no trace of it now. No one can read the shadows of his life on that hard drive.
She holds out her hands to Chuck. He smiles and shakes his head sadly.
“Feisty,” he says, and he cuffs her.
“You’re a troubled little girl,” someone says behind her.
She turns and looks. Dale Chihuly? Crazy curly hair and eye patch and all? For real?
“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” he demands.
She smiles.
“Blow me, Dale Chihuly,” she says.
They lead her to the awaiting squad cars and take her away.