The Skill of Our Hands--A Novel Page 19

  “He was a cop.”

  “He was a SWAT cop. What’s wrong with Sam?”

  “He’s too…” Ren couldn’t put it into words. Sam’s willingness to step aside and let Phil’s memories and personality replace his reminded her somehow of her mother. Ren had been the only kid in high school without a midnight curfew because her mom was too tired to wait up for her and enforce one. Ren was always in before twelve. Her mother’s exhaustion had more power over her than any other parents’ punishment. “Yesterday we decided it was important to keep the fallout of Phil’s death from landing on Sam and Jane, right?”

  Jimmy and Oskar nodded.

  “Letting Sam take Phil’s stub would be the opposite of that,” Ren said, not looking at either man. “We call ourselves Incrementalists, but maybe it’s less a name and more of a warning. Maybe it’s how we remind ourselves to move slowly because there’s something not the least incremental about every one of us. There’s something reckless about us, or we never would have taken the spike. Even me, and I had to be meddled into taking it. But I’m impatient. Like all of us. I suck at acceptance and I do stupid, impatient, irritated things to fix other things. It’s the only trait, actually, that we all share, the readiness to gamble our life for a chance to make things even just a little bit better in the world. We can’t—we just aren’t capable, none of us—of standing still. We aren’t hopeless and we aren’t helpless. We don’t despair and we don’t quit. Ever. Not even when we die. We come back.”

  Jimmy put his emptied glass on the table and looked so deeply into her that Ren was pretty sure he could see her lunch. He didn’t smile.

  “Sam taking the spike would be a suicide,” Ren said at last. “He’s a disappointed idealist who lost his faith in change and love. We don’t take advantage of that. We fix it.”

  “Very well.” Jimmy’s gaze shifted to over Ren’s shoulder, and he raised an arm to beckon. “Why don’t you see what you can do?”

  * * *

  The dress Irina had borrowed from Ren’s closet was snug across the bust—Ren was almost flat-chested, poor dear—but it was short and Menzie was a legs man, so Irina figured she was going to be just fine. She was meeting him at Revolutionary Grounds—a bit on the nose, sure, but the coffee was good and what could she say, the walls were the right red. Against them, if Irina added a little yellow somewhere, she’d be Kumul colors, and Menzie loved his national team.

  Irina passed a truck on the right and darted in front of a minivan, fast and agile in her new Second’s body and zippy sports car. It had been a gift from Vanessa’s dad, and Irina was trying to maintain the relationship between them, but he kept asking her what had changed, and of course she couldn’t tell him the truth. It made Irina sad.

  Irina twitched the hem up higher as she swept down the entrance ramp to I-10 admiring the warm brown of her thighs. Between the varicose veins, age spots, and the psoriasis around her last Second’s knees, she hadn’t gone bare-legged in twenty years. They’d hurt too, those knees, and been a bit knobby to boot. Irina sighed. It really had been time for a new body when Phil shot her, but she’d earned every scar and wrinkle on the old one, and been proud to wear them. Her new body felt story-less in contrast.

  She had to brake hard and swerve around one of those absurd Porsche SUVs—sports parenting!—but got off the shoulder in front of it easily, still making good time. She’d still been very new to that old body back in 1977, the most recent stub-and-Second among them, and Phil’s dust ritual had shown it to her as Phil had seen it—a little gawky and too thin, with some of Lacey’s mannerisms still mixed in with Irina’s own, letting Celeste bait her.

  Her exit was coming, but the right lane was still boggy with the leavings of rush hour traffic. Feeling fast and agile, Irina swung out wide left, then back across them all to the off-ramp. It was snug, and some idiot honked, but she made it.

  In 1977, Celeste and Phil had been living together in that little Pittsburgh apartment with its pumpkin- and avocado-colored kitchen, and a slow awareness was waking up in the US about what was happening in Democratic Kampuchea. The article in Reader’s Digest had helped. Phil was meddling with a congressman from New York, but it was going slowly, as things with Phil always did.

  Why had Jimmy chosen a memory from that period—the most painful one in recent lives—to reexperience as they dusted Phil? Irina had been in stub when Sophal died, but she’d grazed every one of the memories Sophal had seeded, scratching the characters into her skin with a fingernail. Irina remembered Sophal’s forced march out of her beautiful city with the blood-soaked body of her son—ten years old and on fire with fever—strapped to her body with yards of yellow fabric. She walked with his foot in her hand for hours before she put it down and left it.

  Irina parked on Fifth, under a metal awning, and took the darkest sidewalk, almost wanting someone to hassle her.

  * * *

  Ren watched Frio, Jane, and Sam thread their way toward her, Oskar and Jimmy, Jane waving, Sam watching her, and Frio watching him. Jane sat beside Oskar, and Ren took her bag from the chair she’d been saving for Frio. He sat next to her, across from Oskar, with Sam on his other side, facing his wife.

  “You made excellent time.” Jimmy reached across Oskar to pour wine into Jane’s glass. “It took us nearly as long to park as it took you to go home, change, and get here.”

  “We found a spot just across the street,” Sam said, handing his glass gratefully to Jimmy. “Jane has great parking karma.”

  Oskar snorted and Jane looked over the rim of her glass at him. “I’m guessing you don’t?”

  “That’s not a thing.”

  “Clearly not for you. Maybe the universe is trying to tell you something.”

  Ren knew Jane was teasing, but Oskar did an actual double take. “The universe can’t talk.”

  Jane laughed like bright gravel, and she leaned in to bump her shoulder playfully to Oskar’s. “No, of course not. Not in words.”

  Oskar shook his blond head. “Not in anything. Not in words or omens or parking spots. The universe has no agency. There is no vast, inchoate intelligence ‘out there’ struggling to communicate with us through our automobiles. You postulate nature endowed with consciousness, yet everything humanity has ever accomplished has been through increased knowledge and understanding of the objective processes of nature that deny the existence of any such. Including the history of the belief in nature endowed with consciousness. As a pagan, you ought to understand better than most the contradiction between the historical presence of gods in every facet of nature, and where you’ve ended up today, with, ‘I think there’s something, sort of.’ That process itself—understanding the history of religion, of human thought—is part of the natural world, and subject to scientific analysis.”

  “I’m not a pagan, I’m a witch.” The laughter was stripped from Jane’s voice leaving something made of ancient standing stones. “I don’t care about what god or gods have made. I care about what we make—about how I can learn to use my power to create and alter my reality. I look into the world and see an elegant web of finely tuned, infinite possibility. But if you want to see a soul-less, purpose-less chaotic tangle, you can certainly build your own nest and sit in it.”

  “You deliberately choose delusion over truth?”

  “No, I chose my delusion over yours.”

  Oskar scowled, and Jane turned to the waitress, who’d kept her distance during Oskar’s monologue. “I’ll have the tamales, please, as they come so highly recommended.” She winked at Jimmy, who blew her a kiss from his fingertips. “They are good, right?” she asked the waitress, who nodded and gave Jane the first real smile Ren had seen from the girl all night.

  Jimmy ordered more wine, Oskar announced he was switching to beer, and the rest of the table put in their orders while he fumed. When the waitress left, Oskar leaned back in his chair to address Jane, and Ren had a sudden hunger for popcorn, followed by a sudden pang of missing Phil. He’d taught her to e
njoy Oskar. But Jimmy cut Oskar off before he could get past his first salvo, which promised to be either a contrast of reason and intuition or a quote from Einstein about eternal mystery. “Excuse me,” Jimmy said, “but I believe that I have some facility with both reason and intuition.”

  Jane leaned forward to look across Oskar to Jimmy. “I believe you do,” she said.

  Oskar said nothing so Ren asked him. “And Jimmy, what do you believe?”

  “I believe Oskar would never attack someone’s belief system over a lighthearted remark about parking.”

  Jane sat back in her chair as if to get enough distance to have a good, hard look at Oskar. He didn’t move, his face rigorously blank. “Okay,” she said and didn’t look at anyone else. “And?”

  Ren heard a strange, hard note in Jimmy’s usually warm voice: “Oskar is acting out because he misses Phil. He feels an urgency he doesn’t understand to settle the question of Phil’s Second—I feel it too, and understand it not at all—but I am accustomed to waiting. Whereas for Oskar, circumstance has enforced patience on a man of action. He’s frustrated. He’s frightened. We all are, and this dinner reminds us too much of one we had with Phil in Las Vegas once, except tonight is pivoted one hundred and eighty degrees.”

  Ren closed her eyes.

  “Ren, at least, can acknowledge that. But Oskar would first have to admit the power his emotions have over him, and he can’t, so he’s fighting it in Jane.”

  “As Ren once remarked,” said Oskar coldly, “I’m right here.”

  “We both are,” Jane said, and she looked at Sam, whose shoulders seemed ready to snap from the intensity of the focus he’d been directing at his wife.

  “It’s getting to all of us,” Jimmy said after a moment. “We’re all wound up, spiraling in. If it weren’t getting to me, I wouldn’t have just done that to Oskar.”

  Sam poured more wine into Jane’s glass. Jane looked at the lot of them—again—like they were crazy. And Ren thought maybe they were. Maybe being a witch was the sanest thing any one of them sitting there was. Something passed between Jimmy and Oskar, but Ren couldn’t quite read the nuance.

  “Oskar,” said Jimmy brightly. “Oskar, have you made the funeral arrangements yet?”

  “For Phil,” Oskar said, like he’d had to think through the other options: Jane couldn’t kill him, he wouldn’t eat her alive. “For Chuck,” he corrected himself.

  “Yes,” Jimmy agreed affably. “For Chuck.” He looked at Ren in both challenge and support. “What we do next, before we spike Phil into anyone, is grieve Chuck.”

  “Oh,” Ren said, but it sounded different.

  “I spoke to his brother and his dad,” Oskar said. “They understand that we won’t have his ashes yet. People are flying in. I’ve let the poker room manager at The Palms know, and some local people here. We still need to reserve a place to hold the memorial, but I wanted to consult with Ren before I booked it.”

  He looked at Ren, and nothing in his eyes said anything about it being just a body.

  DECEMBER, 1857

  SLAVERY WAS LEGAL IN EVERY NATION ON EARTH.

  I might have felt different if I’d thought Brown’s plans could work. But I’d been there, I’d traveled through the slave states. The slaves weren’t ready to rise, particularly at the call of a white man they didn’t know or trust. I remembered Nat Turner. I remembered Irina’s seeds from Haiti.

  No, it was an adventure and, worse, an adventure that would unify the South against Abolition, and kill Northern sympathy. Like I’d told Celeste, we might be set back fifty years, or a hundred, just by that one act.

  He had to be stopped.

  I had tried meddling with him, I’d tried sending desperate messages to our New England people to meddle with his collaborators. Nothing. I considered exposing his plan and trying to stop it that way, but I didn’t have enough details to make the exposure believable; all I’d accomplish would be to destroy his supporters, including, quite possibly, Frederick Douglass himself.

  The Adair cottage was a long way away, and the Sharp’s in my mittened hand grew heavier as I made my way thitherward, as if it, too, were reluctant. It was a model 1853 Percussion Carbine, with the pellet primer system and the slanting breech. It had a hinged sight, brass plate, iron bindings. I’d never been enamored of firearms the way some people are, but it was a beautiful piece of work—an efficient and deadly tool. Though shorter than the full rifle, a skilled marksman could reliably hit a small target from a hundred yards. I’d need to be much closer. Close enough to see Brown’s face, with its prominent forehead and sharp nose and firm mouth. I’d have to be close enough to see the look of shock on his face when the bullet struck him. And the blood. I might not get more than one shot, so I’d have to shoot him in the head. There would be a great deal of blood.

  And then?

  Then I’d wait. I wouldn’t try to get away. They’d probably hang me, and that was fine. Either I’d come back out of stub, or I wouldn’t. At that moment, I didn’t much care.

  SIXTEEN

  Well-Meant But Inadequate Refreshment

  Irina checked the yellow silk flower in her hair and the crucifix at her throat as she walked. She pulled her pair of cute-nerd glasses out of her bag and yanked open the door to Revolutionary Grounds.

  “Vee!” From a back table, Menzie, shaved bald and squatly muscular, raised a paw in greeting.

  Irina waved back, mimed coffee drinking, and got in line. She’d forgotten he called her Vanessa. When they’d first met, she had used her Second’s name to make a connection between her Chinese last name and his Papua New Guinean one. She ordered a drink, also a piece of cake, but only because Menzie had a sandwich, and checked to make sure her actors were in place.

  She’d called in two anonymous tips and a personal favor, and ta-da—there he was, two tables in front of Menzie, looking alert, but playing it cool—one of Tucson PD’s finest. And wearing tactical black instead of police blue. Perfect. Also, Amber, the waitress Irina had hired to flirt with the cop, was wearing the Sun Devils jersey Irina had dropped off for her on her way to Ren’s. Amber wasn’t due to make her first approach for another fifteen minutes, but she spotted Irina, waved and winked. Irina returned the greeting with her best “Grad Student Conducting A Psychology Experiment” smile and wished she’d thought to grab a clipboard from Phil’s jumbled prop closet. Still, everything looked in order, especially considering how little time she’d had to set it up. She wove her way through the tables to Menzie’s.

  “I still miss your dreads.” She dragged the empty chair across from Menzie closer to him and sat down.

  He grinned but shrugged her hand off his shoulder. “You sound like my mama. She’s stopped calling me Beautiful Boy. About time,” he grumbled, but his face softened.

  “You’re still beautiful,” Irina told him, even though it wasn’t quite true. Menzie’s head was almost perfectly spherical, and without the gorgeous, fat dreads he’d worn through college, he looked like a face reflected in a doorknob. His baldness exaggerated the upswept slant of his eyes and the width of his cheekbones. But he’d traded beauty for something fiercer, and Irina liked it. Menzie dragged a messenger bag from the floor onto his lap, extracted a folder, and slid it to her.

  “How you spoil me!” Irina took the file with a wink Menzie didn’t return.

  “Open it.” Menzie looked from the folder to Irina, and she hesitated, letting his anticipation heighten his attention. She touched the cross at her throat absently—it was almost identical to the one he wore—and tilted her head to put the yellow flower directly in front of the red wall. His eyes darted back to the folder.

  That was a very bad sign. If they were still working toward the same goals, their commonalities should increase Menzie’s sense of belonging and inclusion, rewarding him with a warm oxytocin wash of bonded-ness and confidence. Irina pointedly looked from him over her shoulder at the Tucson police officer, hoping definition by contrast might work where inclusion
had failed her.

  “What are these?” She looked up from the photos. “They look like something from the set of that Avengers movie.”

  “I know, right? Only it’s Star Trek, not The Avengers.” Menzie’s grin split his round head like a PacMan mouth.

  “What does it have to do with us?”

  “Everything. US General Keith Alexander is watching you from his Information Dominance Center, in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, courtesy of a set designer hired out of Hollywood. This guy actually spent public money to build a replica captain’s chair smack in the middle of NSA headquarters so he can sit there just like Jean-Luc Picard, only without the tea or humanity. Spy on civilians? Make it so!”

  Irina wrapped her anxiety-chilled fingers around her mug and gave Menzie her best playful smile. “I’ll see your Picard spymaster and raise you a Vader-enabled predator drone.”

  “Border Control has had drones for ages.”

  “Not Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar ones.”

  “Nobody cares.”

  “You care.” Irina kept her voice low, trying for sultry. If Menzie thought she was arguing, he’d set his teeth and never go back to the important work she needed him for. His tenacity was part of his strength, but if Irina couldn’t leverage his righteous anger to direct it, he’d go with the outrageous story rather than the insidious one. “You care that city police departments are turning into standing armies. You care that they’re walling us in—literally with a fourteen-foot-tall metal fence, and figuratively a one-hundred-mile wide ‘constitution-free’ zone around the whole damn Land of the Free—borders and coasts.”

  Menzie pulled the photos of Fort Belvoir from her hands and stared at them. “I’m running these.”

  “I think you should. They’re sensational, just go all the way with it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She had him. Menzie believed in serious journalism, not sensationalism. He went the distance, he didn’t stop shy. “Arizona gets plenty of NSA money,” Irina suggested. “Dig. Connect the dots. Bring it back home.”