Goliath, p.18
Goliath, page 18
“I’m sure they’re beautiful,” David said, indicating in the way he turned that it was time to head back to the group.
Moonlight cut through the forest almost at random, but sometimes David would pass through a beam, and that was when Jonathan saw it.
The patches, the tears, the worn-ness of it. His old leather jacket.
It fit David perfectly.
“You get rough hands,” Linc said to Jayceon, feet dangling over the flaking steel waterfront pier. He felt the patches where duct tape had been put over his holes. Took off the gloves to stare at the skin of his palms, pale beneath the moonlight. Kendrick picked up bits of stone and shrapnel behind them and tossed them into the ocean. The whole place smelled like seaweed and skunk, but the moon shone bright overhead and he could pinpoint just where in relation to the celestial body the Colony hovered. It was a speck no bigger than the farthest star, but he imagined he could see it rotating. “Rough feet too, walking around in them boots all day, kicking piles of trash. Feel like I’m turning into a brick.” He turned his hands over, let them sit in his lap. “You think anyone up there got hands like us?”
Bugs was on Linc’s other side, hands limp in his lap, just staring out into the water. The look on his face telling of the moment you’re watching something drift away and it finally settles in your brain stem that you’ll never see it again. Maybe being reminded of his old neighborhood when they’d gone to pick up Ace and seen him get thrown out his house had done something to him. Realizing how little must have been rebuilt after the storm, how Bugs could no longer pretend it was a place he could go back to, maybe that was what had his face like that. Linc wanted to pat him on the leg or punch his arm, but instead just looked away, pretending his own thousand-yard stare, hoping his posture said “it won’t feel like this forever” loud enough for Bugs to hear, and certain enough to hide the lie.
Kendrick tossed more junk into the sea. “White folk ain’t got our constitution. Can’t none of ’em swing a hammer like I can.”
“Goddamn right,” Jayceon said quietly around a new cigarette.
Linc turned and could see, seated on a bench, Mercedes, with Timeica leaning against the back of the thing, testing its strength by propping herself on it by her arms. Mercedes was rolling a Turkish cigarette that glowed with flecks of radioactive dust.
“You ain’t a stacker till you smash your thumb,” Timeica said. “First busted finger I had, the nail turned all the way black and just fell off. Took about a year to grow back.”
Mercedes didn’t seem to be listening.
Timeica laughed, then let up off the bench, came around, and sat on it.
Linc didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, but saw Mercedes wearing the look of someone whose head keeps falling off their hammer, someone frustrated, realizing any light at the end of the tunnel’s just more tunnel. She looked ready to die.
“You seen Ace around some?” Kendrick asked no one in particular. He’d stopped throwing shit into the water.
Jayceon lit up another Newport. “He somewhere he can’t stack.” The flame danced at the end of his cig. “Might be there for a couple years.”
Winter was on its way, and Linc could already see in his mind’s eye the warehouse they’d huddle in, the rusted garbage can whose burning refuse would provide their warmth. He could already feel the cold biting through his duct-taped fingertips, could see the stackers dropping off who caught pneumonia and couldn’t get it treated. He could feel hammers accidentally breaking hands, leaving them monstrously swollen and constricted.
“We ain’t dead,” Linc whispered to himself.
He looked up at where he thought the Colony sat. “Good luck to you, Officer,” he said before walking back the way he had come.
It had been less than a second, but, in the way that daydreams stretch time like a rubber band, it had felt long enough to hear a whole sentence. Long enough to see Kendrick turned into Jake, tossing debris into the California Aqueduct and Linc turned into a little boy, legs dangling under the bridge railing, and Mama standing behind them. Long enough for this smaller Linc to feel her smile on his back and to hear Pop walk up behind her, Pop before Nevada and the drink and Jake hanging from a tree and the family splitting up and Mama lost in her grief and Pop taking his last remaining boy to join the Exodusters, Pop before his dying, and wrap his arms around Mama’s waist and lean in and lose his face in Mama’s hair and murmur in a voice dripping thickly with love, “Hey, Miss Pepper,” and smile because Pop was the only one who could still make a joke over Mama’s name and not get hit for it.
Less than a second but long enough for Linc to have felt it, to have held it in his beat-to-shit hands, and collected it, the memory so heavy in his pockets that it slowed his walk.
He didn’t mind.
PART III
WINTER
Leaves moved across Rodney’s target reticle, crisp and flaking with veins like gnarled spines. A mountain wind carried them through Sniper’s Alley. Reflected in the shards of glass beneath his one straightened leg: food wrappers, the remains of cheese-and-flatbread sandwiches with half moons chewed into them, cigarette butts crushed and leaning with some of them curled in on themselves, sticking like stubbed tree branches out of mountains of ash and soot and silvered dust.
It was dusk.
Weeds split the concrete floor by his other boot, pressed as it was against a stump of once-marble, what had maybe a long time ago been the base of a column. Fiber-optic snakes coiled through the cinders and flakes. Angled toward him was the screen of a small, foldable tablet. It flashed with scrambled images. Interrupted by dead-channel television grain: a school building in the aftermath of an artillery attack with its steel supports bent like half-flexed fingers and the bars over the windows crimped like fangs in an animal with no face above its mouth, hospitals where even the blood had been incinerated and where building and pulverized bone corkscrewed into the sky, wafted by waves of burn. Somewhere above him, clutched in a corner of the roof, was a wasp’s nest. And every morning, a metal swing would creak with activity, hung from a crossbeam coated in blooddust, the floor beneath it scuffed soft as flour.
A fallen column propped his back up. Stopped being discomfort a long time ago and was now numbness. Small, rotted bits of ceiling fell down to splash on his outstretched thigh. His shooting arm lay at his side. Palm facing the ceiling. Eyes closed. The fingers of his left hand twitched. Electricity hummed in the veins of an arm that bled cables. His right, he crossed over his stomach.
Cords from his left arm ended at the monitor in which rippled harried shots from the cameras held by scouts and a remote Land Rover. Flashes of faraway machine-gun fire, explosions that growled like a Tamaskan Dog held back by a muzzle. The occasional glint of light off an errant piece of glass that burned back, in its reflection, length after length of shadow to unearth another sniper similarly angled.
* * *
RAKIM had talked at Rodney. Not to him.
Rodney would listen, and Rakim would speak about how dangerous militia forces had made it, sounding all of eighteen years old. He was always moving, Rakim. Always moving, so that his camera always powered on with coordinates far away from its previous check-in. But in the few instances Rodney caught an errant glimpse of his body in the static gray of a monitor, Rakim wore a different set of clothes. Rebel forces, one night, had come to his house to look for him and when they couldn’t find him, they’d arrested his brother. He had vanished for a time, and Rodney thought he was dead and didn’t bother mourning him, then found his timestamp and IP address again on a new montage of chemical attack sufferers later that week. The kid had found bribe money, and the bribe money had found the hands of the right border guards.
They looked the same, the journalists and the rebel fighters. Early twenties with close cut or carefully tousled hair with a beret maybe, many of them in olive green or urban gray. Camera-ready at every angle. And their forever-posture was Morosely Charismatic.
In the beginning, when Rodney had arrived at the city and looked over its eastern border from his bluff, he saw that mountain ridge that surrounded the city and made it a bowl, and, with his rifle slung over his shoulder, he had watched the deluge of refugees pushing and swarming in both directions. Families, fighters, filmmakers.
Rodney had seen fear before, had noted through his riflescope the dilation of pupils, the raising of eyelids, the recognition of the moment that films the eye with the beginnings of tears. The huffing and the shouting and the weeping at the border, the grunting and the shoving and the slipping of sandals and sneakers against pulverized ground, Rodney had noted all of it. What brought him here was a mystery until that moment at the border, watching that wild swirl of humanity ordered through and across checkpoints, in caravans or in pockets or as individuals.
It was to cure an itch. It was the curing of the same itch Rodney had seen in some of those entering the city, those with cameras disassembled and hidden about their persons, pieces of documentary tools strapped to them, a pencil here, sheets of a notebook there, eyes glinting with the same longing, craving, mania he felt when paying witness to wartime grotesqueries.
When Rakim’s first images graced Rodney’s screens, it did not escape Rodney’s notice how intentional Rakim had made the appearance of bits and pieces of his own body. An arm, a thigh, a few fingers caught in the frame of a massacre’s aftermath’s documentation. More than the shake that charted the handheld course of a gun battle, this seemed more than instinct, more than the human impulse toward survival, more than fear. Rakim was playing. On the other side of the camera, never filmed, never photographed, was Rakim smiling.
Rodney had wondered if Rakim knew this sniper was pirating his data stream, stealing his eyes. And when Rakim began his running monologue, Rodney had wondered to whom the boy spoke. How many followers did he have? How many people was he talking to when he told them about the mold that crawled along the walls of his “cave” and the maggots and the carcinogenic that hung like a blanket in the room where he slept and edited. How many people was he showing where he kept his packs of Gauloises Reds and his BIC lighter, where, through the blink and scratch of the security camera Rodney had hacked, Rodney saw the array of digital cameras that hung from the water pipes running along the wall? Where a rebel fighter, emblem’d uniform folded to make a pillow, lay wrapped in a blanket some shade of blue by the chair that Rakim occupied when he worked?
Longing brought Rodney back to his body and the stiffness that burned in his angled knee. The tiny pebbles filling the space between the wall and the small of his back. The sweat-sour that told him it was time for another fix.
When the air shimmered like this and the walls bled into the air that touched them, the kill brass littering the floor by his thighs, once golden and now rust, became indistinguishable from his dragons. Evacuated inhalers, pushers deflated, openings where he would fit them to the crimson, corroded sockets in his arms and along his neck.
Pain curled the fingers of his organic arm into a half fist. The low-level ache that sat just beneath his skin grew pins and needles that pricked the thigh of his outstretched leg. The sight of the small, black blur that had scurried into the scope of his rifle awakened him. Something in him stirred.
His organic hand fumbled in one of the pockets in his vest, but he knew. He’d long since outlasted his supply of dragons. Evidence of the craving was cluttered around him. Occasionally, when he still had some left and the leviathan would stir inside him, the bars of its cage rattling, its growl escaping his lips as a sharp intake of breath, a gasp, he would fight it. Keep his hands clenched in a trembling fist. And some days he would last half a minute. Some days he would last a full minute. And in those joyous moments of righteous agony, he could feel the light getting closer. The longer he held out, the brighter it became until it was enough to sear his eyeballs. The pain rendered him ecstatic. The harder it got to breathe, the closer he got to climax. And after the pain became the high, he would reach into his pouch, touch dragon to outlet and let the narcotic wash him beneath wave after wave of orgasm. He would shudder. And a small, limping smile would curl his lips as the sun faded away and night carried him into sleep.
But, now. Now, there was only the graveyard of used dragons, his kill brass, and the figure that had wandered into his field of vision. The first bit of human motion all day, and his focus tightened.
Rodney knew what the kill would mean, what itch it would cure. And he redoubled his efforts to keep from firing the shot, even as the figure swam behind the shelter of a mortared bus. A small curve of scalp could be seen through one of its empty windows. Air thickened in Rodney’s chest. He bit his teeth against the urge. Sweat beaded his forehead and ran down his ash-covered cheeks in muddy rivulets.
A second shadow darted into view to join the first. Rodney’s heart quickened and he closed his eyes, but the men still glowed as heat signals in his brain, images burned behind his eyelids by the rifle to which his arm was connected. They glared against the cooling soil.
The walls of his home shrunk and expanded in the same instant. Time swam in a cloud around him. The world fell away, columns collapsing outward, roofs crumbling, the floor disintegrating with bits of it falling into empty white void, apocalypse, and he welcomed the alabaster ego-death. It burned. How it burned. Resist, and you will inherit the earth. The message rumbled his bones inside him. It gripped him and held him still while the space around him tore itself apart and lightning struck in his brain and thunder crackled, and suddenly, a bolt louder than any he had heard in weeks struck him into oblivion, and his eyelids slackened and behind them was the white flame and, in its aftermath, the pieces of the two men rolling about in the crater. They struggled to hold their bodies together, to gather their separated pieces, and their blood, when it left them, glowed hot, steaming itself cool when it touched the ground.
Slowly, their colors dimmed. And dimmed, and dimmed, until they were the same color as the ground on which they lay.
A sigh left Rodney deflated. Silence had returned. He knew that were he to touch the end of his sniper rifle, his hand would come back burning. A new shell casing joined the others on the floor around him. The rifle reloaded automatically as the kill brass welcomed its brethren.
Dusk deepened into night.
As the clouds shifted, Rodney watched through a narcotic haze a few civilians who still dared the snipers and drones by inviting friends over for tea they warmed by the barrels around which some of the homeless huddled to heat their limbs. A couple climbed onto their rooftop to make love, writhing in near-silence beneath their blankets. Children who didn’t know better found a back alley in which they could play a game of football. One of them would call an audible before every play. Sounds of men and women wrapped in cloaks to shield their heat signatures gathering the remains of the murdered scratched and itched into Rodney’s earpiece. Somewhere nearby, others dumped weapons and the remains of a camera in a nearby river.
Inherit the Earth
On April 17, 20—, in Long Beach, California, a man selling mobile water filtration systems leaves a customer’s house and stands on a sidewalk invaded by weeds. Briefcase in hand, he watches a sea of Black and brown and white people surging through the street. Among them are men and women in their early thirties, a few youths in their twenties, and a cabal of Black teenaged boys. They are running from the police.
Along the street, windows slam shut, and the salesman sees now that some of the officers and the police-bots zooming like raindrops caught in the midst of a rare rainfall are raising their pistols at the windows. Low-grade mechs stomp from far away, gobbling up yards of concrete with each stride. No firecracker pistol shots punctuate the spring afternoon, but the salesman watches two police descend on a Black boy in a baggy white T-shirt. Tackled and pinned to the ground with an officer’s knee on his neck, he lets out a choked yelp with each blow of the shock-stick. The salesman hurries down and asks: “What’d he do? You’re gonna kill him.” When the police tell the salesman to “get over here,” he asks, “Why?”
For that question, he joins the youth on the pavement beneath the hail of electrified blows and four others, much younger than the salesman, in the back of the police van that transports them to the local precinct, where their beating resumes. Among the names shouted at them by their assailants are: “dog,” “shitbird,” and “nigger.” In the corner of their cell lies an older man, Hispanic, absolutely still, undisturbed by all the racket. Recovering, later, the salesman asks one of his cellmates if the older man is still alive, and the young man who responds, a bleeding lump having erupted on his forehead, says that the old man is a neighbor of his and “when they saw the cops out there beating us up, he asked them what was going on, and they just turned around and clocked him; like, he didn’t even have a chance to put his hands up or protect his face or nothing.” His question was of the same genre as the salesman’s and so too was their punishment twinned. The salesman, upon a brief, fraught stay in St. Mary Medical Center after his release, lost an eye out of the encounter and gained a limp. It is easier now, he says, for the cops to notice him on the street. And to act accordingly.
No charges have been filed as a result of the encounter, and calling it an “encounter” lends it the very quotidian designation that seems to hover over these incidents, the frequency of which has skyrocketed in the wake of increased space flight, incidents which many believe smoothed the way for the race riots that spilled through the city that summer and which were a shock to The New York Times, The American Standard, every other nationally syndicated publication, and much of the rest of the world. Indeed, the only people who did not seem to be shocked by the riots were the residents of color in the city that burned around them.
