Self-Storage

Sergei drives us to this storage garage the Lincoln Hotel rents out for when we auction off evicted people’s stuff. It’s where I’ve been keeping the computers.

We pull off Studebaker Road into the Mr. Storage lot. Sergei’s SUV, wide as a snowplow and about as economical, is the only car, or whatever it is, in the lot. They’re closed for the day after Christmas, but I’ve got an outdoor access key, so we don’t need any help getting to the computers.

Sergei says, “I am surrounded by spondees.”

“What?” Maggot Arm Joe says.

“Spondees. Names with one-syllable each. Nick Ray. Joe Cole. Hank Crow. I am surrounded by spondees.”

I’m fiddling with the keys in front of the big orange door.

“Shut up,” Maggot Arm Joe says. “I hate it when foreigners know the language better than me.”

Sergei turns to him. “I not foreigner. More American than you. I love this country. I have three green cards.” He squints against the sun. “I am many Americans, right, Nick Ray?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I say. I undo the lock.

“No,” he says, and slides the door. “That’s right, Nick Ray. You know nothing. Keep knowing nothing. Keep you healthy.”

“Loud and clear,” I say.

Sergei looks at us before stepping into the storage unit. “Spondees,” he says. “My lot for life.”

An old Datsun B210 pulls in next to Sergei’s SUV.

“Trouble?” I say.

Sergei looks, frowns, shakes his head. “Just some person visiting their things. Like us.”

Inside, it doesn’t look like much. Or even the potential for much. There’s a beat-up piano, the kind families two generations deep in tone-deaf, ham-fisted nonplayers give away when Grandma dies, leaning against the left wall. Against the right wall is one stack of four banana boxes next to one stack of five banana boxes. There are my nine 386 hard drives, one per box, laid flat and horizontal like flight luggage. I open the top box and see the computer metal that’s faded nicotine brown. The storage area’s cramped and the outside light doesn’t reveal much.

“You got a monitor?” Maggot Arm Joe says. “I’d like to see what’s in these.”

“Not here,” I say.

Sergei shakes his head.

But I know, whether or not these look like it, they are my future. They will be my good or bad luck, and whether they look cruddy and innocuous or not, they will lead to one extreme or the other. I run my finger along the cool metal.

There’s a crunch on gravel outside the storage unit, and before I know what’s happening, Sergei’s standing at the entrance with a gun in some guy’s face. I had no idea he had a gun on him, and my heart hiccups in my chest. The guy looks to be in his midfifties, maybe sixty. He looks like my dad, if my dad was scared crazy. He puts his hands up like we’re robbing him.

Sergei says, “You have no business here.”

The guy doesn’t say anything. I make a move toward Sergei and Maggot Arm Joe grabs my arm.

“You are here why?” Sergei says. He holds the gun the way the kids in the movies do these days, the handle out to the side, and I wonder if he got that from the movies or if the movies got it from people like him. It doesn’t matter how he holds it, though, he’s a foot and a half away from the guy and he’ll probably blow through the back of his head at this range.

“I was checking my food,” the guy finally says. “Next door? Unit seventy-one?” He holds up a key between his index finger and thumb.

“Food?” Sergei says. “In storage?” He starts to put the gun down and me and the guy release deep breaths.

“Food,” the guy says, and you can tell he’s not sure whether he should go on or not. His hands are still up.

“Who puts food at Mr. Storage? Don’t lie to me.”

“Vac-U-Seal food.” He pauses. “For terrorism.”

Sergei holsters his gun. “What the shit are you talking about?”

At first, the guy’s still nervous. His voice is rushed and cracky, but a while into his explanation, it becomes a pitch. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket and the smart people, it seems, are locking themselves in basements with Vac-U-Seal food. The gun seems, for him and Sergei at least, forgotten.

You’ve met this guy. He’s at the bar yapping about how the government’s going to put chips in our hands. Chips in our brains. He’s got theories on JFK and MLK, he knows things about J. Edgar Hoover they’d never put in books. The government doesn’t let us see in Area 51 and do you know why? Of course you do, any fool can see that there’s something to hide. Where’s the sealed Operation Blue Book information? Where’s the truth about those nuclear tests? And where, and don’t think they don’t know, is the rest of Kennedy’s brain? He wants answers, damn it. And no one’s talking—at least no one’s saying anything he wants to hear. His life is fear and synchronicity and fallout shelters. He yearns for an audience, even one that just pulled a gun on him and almost blew his head off is okay. Sergei seems hooked.

The guy’s going on about how much those bastards in Washington know, what they’re not telling us, and so on. Me and Maggot Arm Joe roll eyes at each other while the guy rambles on about terrorism, about the lies of the Bushes, about how the entire developed world’s food supply’s going to be contaminated by our government or someone else’s, that the world’s going down, down, sinkhole down, and someone better be prepared for the calamity. This is fire and brimstone, this is Book of Job, and he shall be cast out and have no name in the street and we’re talking pestilence and suffering and worldwide starvation.

Dust-bowl sorrows that would have left Woody Guthrie awestruck and mute. End-of-the-world shit. World War II was a roll of Neco wafers next to this. This guy’s got bad news he wants to share, he’s Nostradamus in Bermuda shorts and you better listen, friend.

Sergei says, “Your government. They know nothing about this?” When the government lies to him, Sergei calls it “your” government. When he lies to them, they’re his government.

“They know plenty,” the guy says. “That’s just it. Haves and have-nots. They used to need have-nots as workers, but now computers are replacing the need for humans—there’s too may of us. They want to kill us—you need to see. Medical science gets better—allows us to live longer, so what happens? Congress votes down nationalized health care. They won’t let us sue the fucking HMOs that would rather see us die of cancer than pay for a test. They want us to fucking die. There are too many of us.”

And here I’m a little frightened because the last one made sense to me.

The guy says, “Do you think they really don’t know how to shut off a nuclear reactor? That they don’t know how to fix this fucking terrorist problem?” He gives the three of us his business card. It reads:

Mel Collins

Vac-U-Seal Foods

Foods for the New Millennium

“You have this food here? No refrigeration?” Sergei says.

“That’s the thing,” Mel Collins says. “You don’t need to.” He leads us toward his storage unit. Things are happening too fast; the shifts have menace and I can’t seem to gain a fix on the situation. If everything would slow down, I’d be okay, but I’ve been up all night, watched Sergei pull a gun on this guy, and now I’m walking into an infomercial.

“This is the vacuum pack,” Mel says, handing a vacuum tube to Sergei and one to Maggot Arm Joe. “And this is the food dehydrator.” Sergei nods.

Mel Collins throws a hunk of dried meat at me. I catch it, ready for it to feel like a canned ham, but it’s as light as balsa. Mel Collins says, “How much do you think you’re holding?”

I give him a look that says I don’t get it.

“How much weight?” he says. “How many pounds of meat is that?”

I’ve been a drug addict, I know my ounces, my metric weights, if need be. Metric was supposed to be the thing of the future back in the seventies. By the turn of the century we’d be zipping quietly from town to town in our electric cars. We’d pull into a charging station and ask how many kilometers it was to Dallas. But it didn’t work out that way. The future of the past is rarely the present. Only Ed Begley Jr. has an electric car and only scientists, addicts, and narcotics officers can tell a kilo from a pound and do the math in their heads. So how much does Mel Collins’s dry meat weigh? I shrug, raise and lower it a couple of times. “Five ounces.”

He shakes his head. “Not even close,” he says. “That’s twelve pounds of meat—dehydrated and Vac-U-Sealed. And here’s the thing. When you want to eat it, the process is reversible. It’ll be that same twelve pounds of meat again.”

Maggot Arm Joe takes the meat from me. “Really?”

Mel Collins says, “Well, no. That’s a minor distortion. Eleven pounds. You lose some.”

“Where?” Maggot Arm Joe says. “Lose it where?”

“In the process,” Mel Collins says.

“No,” Maggot Arm Joe says. “Physically where?”

“In the process,” Mel Collins says.

“A process isn’t a place,” Maggot Arm Joe says. “Where does the pound of meat go when it’s lost in this process of yours?”

Mel Collins looks confused. Sergei steps forward. “I take six-month meat,” he says. He looks at us. I shake my head and Maggot Arm Joe says he’ll pass.

Sergei says, “Wait outside while we do business.”

We walk a hundred yards or so away. I light a cigarette and sit against the nubby bark of a palm tree. Maggot Arm Joe stands above me. There’s spaghetti sauce dried on his running shoes. I hear the sound of cars revving their way onto the 405 and the 22 behind me.

Maggot Arm Joe takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “So we’re together on this? Me and you?” He pauses. “You know we can’t trust Sergei.”

“We have to,” I say.

“Maybe you have to,” Maggot Arm Joe says. “I trust no one.”

“Then how are we together on this?”

“In not trusting Sergei.”

I wonder if he’s had this talk with Sergei—the “We can’t trust Nick” version. I feel hurt—little-kid hurt. Not-picked-for-kickball hurt. “You don’t trust me?”

“Nothing personal, dog. Just business.”

This is a finger poking at me. This is something I should address, but I don’t know what to say without ending things, so I don’t say anything.

Sergei and Mel Collins come out of the storage unit. I see Sergei shake hands. Maybe he’s saying how sorry he is about holding a gun to Mel Collins’s head. Just business, he’s probably saying, too. You understand.

I lean my way up the palm tree until I’m standing. Me and Maggot Arm Joe shake hands. We’re together, whatever that means, not trusting each other, if things go south with Sergei.

Sergei walks toward us. Mel Collins gets in his car and takes off.

Sergei says, “Let’s take computers out.”

“Why?” I say.

“Mel Collins saw things. He could talk—the computers—they should not be in there if people look.” He looks at Maggot Arm Joe. “You take three. Nick Ray take three. And me.”

“But all nine are mine,” I say.

“Partners or no deal,” Sergei says.

Fuck. He could be bluffing. “No,” I say.

He throws his hands up. “Okay, then. Good luck with computer, Nick Ray.”

“That’s it?” I say.

“No trust, no deal,” Sergei says.

“Why can’t we just put the info on disks?” Joe says.

I say, “Big disks—bigger than the A-drives now. No one has those anymore.” I look at Sergei, staring at me. I fold my hand. “Okay,” I say. “We take three each.” I make sure I grab the one with the silver duct tape that has most of the witness relocation lists in word documents. The other ones are gibberish, unless you know you’re way around DOS. So long as I have the one I’ve already made some sense of, I’m still holding the cards.

He claps. “Much happy. See? Much better.” He slaps me on the back.

“It’s got five and a quarter disks?” Maggot Arm Joe says.

Sergei nods. “Must carry machine.”

*    *    *

Later, we’re in the SUV headed back to the Lincoln with the computers in the back. I say, “You don’t trust Mel Collins?”

“I trust Mel Collins to deliver meat,” Sergei says. “That is all.”

When we get to the Lincoln, I drag my three computers up the stairs to my room and I’m asleep before I can even think about the events of the day.