Goliath, p.3
Goliath, page 3
Bugs sat up a little in the truck bed and looked around. “There was a riot here when I was a kid.”
Linc shot him a look that tried to tell him he still was a kid.
“Cops chased a bunch of us right down this street.” He made a sweep with his arm like he was shooting up the block. “Beat the shit outta my homeboy right on that front lawn.” He snorted out a laugh, tucking the hurt beneath bravado. “Yeah, the homie Jamal got caught outside the Dome and he died, then a bunch of police came through and tore up the block.” He quieted, contenting himself with merely looking around, retracing the ordeal’s trajectory through the neighborhood.
It was originally Linc’s story. About the boy named Jamal who got caught outside a Dome and who had to lie on his back looking up at augmented cops while he suffocated on irradiated air. And it had happened in Long Beach, not New Haven. And the “homeboy” who’d gotten the shit beat out of him had been his brother Jake. Bugs took the story Linc had told him and left out Linc’s mother, who had been trying to tug Linc indoors, and how the cops had been presaged by a band of white Marauders, how they came in on horseback to beat up Black and brown folk, warm ’em up for the police. And how Linc’s pops had looked at the whole thing like “damn, not again.” Maybe something like this had happened to Bugs wherever he’d come from. Or maybe he just liked sounding like he had more history than he really did. Linc was glad when he stopped talking.
When they got to Ace’s spot, a slouching duplex that used to be blue and yellow once upon a time, there was five-oh out front and a couple people that looked maybe like social workers. The County Sheriff was there, a large metal sphere with arms like a spider, one sporting a small-caliber pistol. On its front, a display of a white man’s mustachioed face. Remote policing. The cops were partially cyberized, their essential parts replaceable; hence their stomping around irradiated wasteland. But the social workers looked flesh-and-blood enough. One of them looked like she might boot all over her jeans.
Nobody in the truck bed stirred. The chalky dust on their overalls and their jeans and their boots didn’t even budge. But they all silently watched the man they’d worked with being dressed down like a bitch in front of his family. Linc wanted to spit but had run out of saliva.
The front door hung open, and inside, Ace could be seen sitting down in his living room couch, his arms around his two kids, boy and a girl, relaxed but protecting them from the officer who, hand leisurely to his weapon, stood over them. Staticky blue and white from the TV flashed on the eviction cop’s back.
Linc couldn’t hear what was being said, but Ace, from where he sat, raised his voice. The officer never raised his, but eventually Ace shot up from his seat and screamed, “This some bullshit!”
Ace stomped out before the cop could make it look like he was being escorted, waited for the cop and made like he was standing his ground. “You ain’t got no right. You see this neighborhood? You see it? We the last family on the block. Ain’t no one livin’ here. So what goddamn difference it make if me and my family make a life here, huh? What difference it make?”
The cop raised his non-gun hand, inches from Ace’s chest. “Sir, leave the immediate premises or you will be arrested.”
The social workers walked the children and Ace’s wife out onto the sidewalk, and already movers had materialized to start offloading the family’s furniture. The TV blared. “Do you have a place where you can stay?” the social worker asked Ace’s wife.
“No,” she said back. She seemed too tired to be annoyed or upset that their life was being brought out into the street like so much trash. “We ain’t heard from his family in a couple years.”
The social worker’s face half crinkled in sorrow. “There are some shelters further out. Fairfield and a few more further down the rail line. Our office can furnish you and your family with rail tickets.”
Ace’s wife had stopped looking at the social worker as she droned on, looked instead at the growing pile of furniture and appliances, some of them already rusting from exposure to the poisoned air, some of them already growing rusted blood blisters. Her son, six years old in overalls like the ones Ace wore to work, scurried back inside where his bowl of cereal waited on the table for him. The sight of the kid with his cereal, riveted on the TV while the movers emptied his house, reminded Linc of his own dad who, at the same age as that kid, had come home from school to see all their shit on the sidewalk, an eviction notice stapled to their front door. He hadn’t told Linc much about it, but Jake told him one afternoon when they were skipping stones off the warped pipes of the California Aqueduct that Dad, as a kid, had spent the following two months living in a truck with his dad, their grandfather.
Bishop turned in his seat. The engine had been idling.
Ace’s wife held their infant daughter at her hip.
The officer said “good luck” to Ace and turned away, the silent but ever-watchful sheriff hovering like a pet bird over his shoulder.
“We ain’t dead,” Ace shouted.
Linc could barely hear him over the engine Bishop had now started revving, getting the car ready to peel off.
“You can’t talk about us like we dead. We right here! See this here? This still a family! Ain’t gonna break that! Good luck to you, Officer!”
The rest of Ace’s words were lost in the smoke that billowed from the tailpipe. Bishop shifted into gear and the truck bumped along before shuddering off. No one in the truck bed had moved. Anybody walking by would’ve thought they were sleeping.
“Guess Ace ain’t comin’ to work today,” Jayceon said, arm propped beneath his neck, head bumping softly against the back of the truck bed. Linc heard implied violence in the kid’s voice and wondered what would happen if Bishop spun the car around and caught up with that officer.
Eamonn pulled his Flex out of his shirt pocket, tapped at it a little bit, then handed it over to Jonathan, who found himself staring at screenshots of homes that had been well put together, furnished, lived in, with numbers next to them that represented their bids. The cursor hovered over the main picture, a shot of the house’s front façade and its rose garden, its postcard image, and shot out faded shots of the house’s other sides, views from above, views of the expansive but well-kept backyard, the small gate that kept the place fenced in. The county treasurer, a wrinkled white man whose neck bulged over his shirt collar and the knot in his blue tie, smiled from the top-left corner of the webpage.
“What am I looking at?” Jonathan asked, facing the stars.
“Online foreclosure auction.” Eamonn scratched lazily at his chest. “Houses still being left, folks fell behind on their property taxes, et cetera.”
“Wait, I thought this whole place was abandoned. Is the city still going after these people?”
Eamonn shifted on the rooftop, turned to face Jonathan. “You came in through Fairfield Station, right?”
Jonathan nodded.
“Where do you think that money came from?”
Jonathan frowned, turned away from the auction.
“Look, stop by the town halls over in Westville. When the councilor mentions wanting to work with the ‘good’ residents, think about who he means.” He smirked. “You think this is forced relocation, right? Jonathan.” He put a reassuring hand on Jonathan’s shoulder, moved it down his forearm and wrapped his fingers around the other man’s. “There is nothing wrong with what we’re doing. This place is, for all intents and purposes, abandoned. We’re building it back up. They’re talking of expanding the maglev line here.” He nodded to the west. “And we got a new air filtration plant going up. Those people’ll get jobs. If they wanna stay, they can stay. We’re not kicking them out.”
Photo after photo of prepared homes flowed across the stream with each of Jonathan’s swipes. He pretended Eamonn’s hand wasn’t warm and pleasantly wrapped around his own. Maybe the someone who lived there wasn’t ready to give it up. Maybe her last name was Brown or something and maybe she had hypertension, wasn’t quite overweight, but waddled more than walked. And maybe she had a mole somewhere on the left side of her face and had her hair permed or had some sort of hot comb put to it. Maybe she was retired, or maybe she couldn’t retire because she was working in industries where that wasn’t done, but she did have disability checks. And maybe she just fell behind on the property taxes, taxes that had been waiting for her when she bought the house a couple years before, thinking she was taking a step up in her play at citizenship. Maybe, when she got the foreclosure notice on her Flex, her brother was asleep, having only recently come back from the hospital after his own surgery. And maybe she’d started to tear up and ask her Flex if “they” were really going to take her home from her, her and the Flex knowing exactly who “they” was. And here it was, on the screen before Jonathan’s face. A home where maybe all of that happened.
David would have had a field day talking Jonathan’s ear off about New Haven’s history of racialized housing policies, spouting a detailed and very erudite chronicle replete with riots and interstate highways, and maybe he’d pull up vids or shots of white folks throwing bricks through the windows of Black homes or some mayor’s appeal to calm, a thinly veiled command to maintain some asymmetrical status quo.
Jonathan closed the browser window, handed the Flex back to Eamonn. “What they got in Westville isn’t what I want. It’s not what David wants either.”
“You’ve got buyer’s remorse, and you haven’t even bought it yet.”
“It’s not buyer’s remorse.” It startled Jonathan how quiet his voice had gotten.
“You just don’t want to profit off of someone else’s misery. Is that it?” Eamonn did not smirk, nor did he chuckle. “Maybe this is gentrification, maybe it’s something else. You don’t know those people, and they don’t know you. Heck, they probably don’t even know about you.”
“They shut the water off for them and turn it back on for us.”
“How do you know your house has running water?” Eamonn asked.
What upset Jonathan more than anything else was how much he had begun to sound like David.
The calls had all blended together: David receiving news that Jo had been hospitalized after falling and hitting her head at home, his manager telling him he didn’t need to come into the office next week. Or the week after. Or the week after that. The first call had come while at work, half a dozen holographic screens displayed before him, the chips embedded in his fingertips glowing as he clicked and slid and swiped information from one source to another recipient, the images and news stories and numbers and acronyms somehow translated into stock prices and market share and the stuff that people richer than him used to get even richer. And the second call had come while he sat at his mother’s bedside, everything in the room an oppressive, violent white. She was awake and protesting and telling the attendant every way she knew how that she didn’t need to be here, then upon discovering the attendant was droid’d, calling her every variation of “toaster” imaginable.
But then—when she’d been asked to name the day of the week and she’d answered wrong and when she’d called him the wrong name before, after blinking several times, correcting herself—he’d had to leave.
Bereft of work, he passed many hours at The Viewer, wearing a groove into one bench in particular for much of the day. As ever, a creature of habit, he noted wryly. Outside the windows that seemed to extend forever in each direction, the stars glowed.
When he let his mind drift, it traced the patterns she’d shown him when they used to stargaze together. The stories—this character’s luminous smile, that one’s battle axe, that one’s flowing hair—like some sort of founding myth. He’d been a child, and she’d talked about some Wild West as though it were Atlantis. He’d tried to imagine an open plain and the thrill of fashioning a new life for oneself, of taking a place and making it home, of carving a slice of self out of the chaos and ambition and shootouts and panning for gold in rivers with your bare hands. Older, now, he knew it was a place she’d never seen, a place David experienced as twice-mythologized, filtered and filtered and filtered, copied and re-encoded and JPEG-compressed until generation loss had made it nothing more than brushstrokes and discoloration and thick pixelated black boundaries. But there’d been comfort in making a frontier out of the stars.
Then, when his cyberization allowed him access to greater information, he could trace deeper, more convoluted, more specific patterns. A burst of apophenia, an overworking of his neural circuitry, and geometric origami would form, patterns with whatever meaning he wanted to give them, designs waiting for a religion to claim them.
Now the stars seemed to randomly dot the dark. Thrown there by careless celestial fingers in puerile fits of reckless abandon. A drowsy, fatuous deity promising order and snatching his hand away at the last instant, laughing.
David began to tremble.
A small sign to his left indicated with an arrow the way to the smokers’ lounge.
He rose and followed the subsequent signs until he came to a screen made of glass, the other side obscured by a haze of smoke.
Thoughtless steps brought him past the first set of sliding doors into an anteroom that opened out onto the lounge. People, almost entirely red-bloods like Jo, filled the small space, hovered alone or in small groups, humming conversation in quiet joviality. Some of them stared as he had out the window that opened out onto space. David stood, frozen among them, and constriction returned to his chest. This was a different narrowing, a physical thing like an animal curling in on itself to protect from the wiles of a predator. He coughed.
He coughed again, more vicious than before.
“I think it’s supposed to be a cautionary tale.”
He spun at the voice, dulcet with a hint of rasp.
The stubbled speaker smirked and moved to his side. He had a slim leather jacket, marked along its front with small pockets, over a small gray hooded sweatshirt, the hood pulled back. He looked at David for a second, appraised him, then turned his gaze toward the expanse. His atomizer’s smoke swung between his thumb and index finger before curling up. He smelled of peppermint.
“Want one?” He had snuck his hand into one of the pockets and pulled out a pack, white with a green triangle running down the front. “They’re menthols. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Sure,” David said, not knowing why.
They waited.
“Go on, take it.”
“Oh.” He took the cigarette poking out furthest. The pack retreated into the man’s pocket. He held the thing in his fingers, looked around, then stuck it between his lips as he’d seen the others do. A flick sounded from inside the device, flame danced just before his face.
“Now suck in,” the stranger said playfully.
David glanced at him, did as he suggested. And the constriction gripped his entire chest. He coughed and gasped, carcinogenic misting in front of eyes welded shut.
“I didn’t know any better, I’d say that’s your first.” The stranger chuckled. David heard phlegm in it. “You’re a virgin.”
He coughed until his lungs no longer stung. “What did you mean?” he asked when he got his breath back.
The stranger puffed lazily. “What?”
“What did you mean? When you said this was a cautionary tale, what did you mean?”
“Oh.” He laughed again. The phlegm had thickened. “Well, you saw the smoke from out there, right?”
David nodded.
“Anybody who thinks about starting up, they just gotta take one look through that window there to know what’s waiting for them.”
“Oh.” It came out as a gasp.
David puffed again. It was easier than before once he followed his rhythm. Slow, easy drags. The nicotine stroked his lobes, put him, oddly enough, at ease. The stars blurred until they began winking out, one by one. Vertigo tipped him.
When he opened his eyes again, he was in the stranger’s arms. His heart thrummed at the physical closeness.
“You all right?”
David came to his feet, closed his eyes, shook his head. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. I forget how strong these are.”
“No, really. I’m fine.” David was straight again, poised.
“You sure?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. When he opened his eyes, they stung. But no tears came. He exhaled several times, the cigarette’s battery light winking out its slow death between his fingers, unheeded. The stranger smiled at David, sympathetically, and turned to leave. “My mother has dementia,” David said.
The stranger stopped, turned and looked at him. “Well, shit,” he said, and puffed on his atomizer. “Is that so?”
* * *
“WANNA butt-fuck?”
David had worn an ashen blister into the polyurethane of his thumb, trying to get his jammed atomizer to work. Occasionally, he’d been told, a concentrated enough external heat source could help stimulate the thing. Like jumper cables. Now, heat rose in his cheeks. He faced away from the man in the leather jacket—his smoking jacket, he’d called it—embarrassed. “What?”
“Your lighter. Seems you’ve got a bum lighter.”
David kept trying. Sparks, but no flame. Aggravating the bituminous swelling until the silvered oval had filled out completely.
“Here, let me.” The stranger took the cigarette from David’s lips and held its end to his own while he inhaled. The tips of both kissing cigarettes glowed orange. He handed it back to him. “There you go.”
