Going Shogun (21 page)

“Oh, Jesus,” she says as she puts
her face in her hands.  “That’s another thing.”

“What?”

“I feel like such a shit.  Here I am
yelling at you about being a selfish prick and that couldn’t possibly be more
hypocritical.  I wasn’t being totally honest about everything.”  The look in
her eyes is one that’s already begging for forgiveness before she even finishes.

“Like what?”

“I feel really bad.”

“Tell me.”

“I didn’t give a damn about your
plans or Dorna’s Ascension.  That should be pretty obvious, right?  You guys
were...at first, you guys were simply another distraction.  I said I wanted in
so I could use you to forget that room,” she says, pointing down the hallway.

“That’s okay.  It’s fine.  You had a
lot going through your head.”

“Stop.  Stand up for yourself.  Be
mad at me.  I was using you.”

“Now that I know why, it’s not such
a big deal.”

“It is.  It is a big deal.  It’s not
right.  It’s not fair.  Get pissed.  Didn’t you hear me?  I said I was
using
you!”

I try to reroute the conversation
toward something better, a guileless attempt at keeping her from feeling any more
guilt.  “Even for the sex?  Because that kinda felt like we were using each
other.  In a good way.”

“No, not by that point.  That was
perfect.  You’ll never know how much I needed that release.  Needed that
connection.”

Same here
, I think.

“And I wasn’t using you the whole
time, just until...”

“Until when?”

“Until you kissed me.  I figured out
later that you were only trying to distract me.  But regardless, that started
it, because I
felt
something, man.  Then even more so when I was
eavesdropping on you and that waitress.  You came walking out and you were
different
somehow, and I realized I shouldn’t be using you to hide from my hurt.  And I
know we’re going in opposite directions, you’re an Ascender, I’m a Rescinder,
but here was this awesome guy who looked like he’d found his real self for a
few minutes, and he was somebody I really liked and it wasn’t right for me to
use you as an escape.  And that’s when I decided to hang on, keep going, so I
could be there for you.  Even if it is to watch you climb the stupid ladder, I
wanted to help you find whatever it is that’ll make you happy, because...because
if I can’t find it for myself, it might do me some good to help someone else.”

Wow.

Here it is.  The utterly absolute
moment where everything that I have drooled over for years will ultimately rest
in peace.  There is something, no, some
one
, standing right in front of
me, who’s more important than Ascension, more important than owning my own
restaurant, more important than clawing my way out of the 11s.  I have cried,
begged, pleaded and prayed while on my knees, while in the shower, while lying
in bed, while serving a glass of Candy Water to some jackass R5, for the universe
to listen to me when I say,
Sir, I exist!
in hopes that whatever greater
power is out there will, for once, pay attention and feel obligated to
obliterate my repeated failures and grant me one simple win. 

Who would’ve ever thought it would
come in the form of a pixie rebel? 

No, I’m not going to tell her I love
her.  It’s too early for that.  Plus, I would probably get an empty whiskey
bottle cracked across my skull.

What I do say is this:

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“How long does it take
to fill out the paperwork if you want to Rescind?”

Chapter
15

Go get a dictionary.  Look up the
definition of
shocked
, and you’ll find a picture of Bingo’s face.  Mouth
agape, all the white in her eyes exposed.  She says, “About three hours.  Why?”

“I’ve found the ladder I want to
climb.”

She squints, looks at me closer,
like she didn’t understand.

“Wait,” I say, “that’s the wrong
metaphor.  Or maybe the right one.  Reverse it.  Upside-down it.  Umm.  No,
that doesn’t make any sense either.”

“What?”

“You.  It’s
you
.  You’re the
ladder I want to climb up, but down to.  Is that better?”

“You’re saying you want to Rescind? 
For me?” 

I have no idea what she’s thinking. 
The features on her face are an amalgamation of hope, fear, joy, distrust,
confusion, and whatever descriptor applies to a look of
Are you going
C-status?
  She’s looking at me like I’m channeling Forklift’s dialect.  I
say, “This is going to sound so foreign no matter how it comes out, but here
goes.  I know we’re in, like, the first inning of a double-header, and you were
right, that kiss was a distraction, but then it wasn’t.  Everything in my head
went
kaboom
,” and I attempt to accentuate it by throwing my hands up and
making an explosion noise.  “I felt it too.  But I’ve had this crush on
Fireball, remember her?  I’ve had a crush on her forever—”

“That’s nice to know.”

“No, that was dumb.  I don’t know
where I was going with that.  I don’t anymore, though.  Not.  Anymore.”  The
room is getting warmer and I can feel some sweat leaking onto the t-shirt from
my underarms.  “You’re the only girl that doesn’t throw me into lockdown mode. 
And when we were making love earlier—”

“Don’t say making love.  That’s a
big yuck.”  Her defense mechanisms are starting to kick in, but I can tell she
understands where I’m going with this.

“Right.  Big, big yuck,” I say. 
“What I’m trying to get out is that I laid there for a long time after, holding
you, thinking and thinking and thinking, and it occurred to me everything I had
been reaching into the sky for, everything I’ve been wanting to feel for years,
was happening right there.  That I want to ascend
you
, not through the
ranks.”

Did that make any sense either?

She walks around the bar and stops
in front of me.  I’m at least a foot taller than her, so she has to reach up to
put a hand on my cheek.  “Chris, c’mon.  You can’t Rescind for me.  You’ve
wanted to be up there your whole life.”

“I’m highly impressionable.  Waking
up to waffles can change a man.”

“I’m serious.”

“Me too.”

“But not about the waffles, I hope.”

“Not about the waffles.  Here’s the
thing.  When we left Cat’s place last night after I’d freaked out on Forklift,
I was on the verge of begging him for us to back out.  After everything that
happened, it’s not worth it.  Not like that.  I don’t know what got into me, or
how I let it go on for so long.  Then you happened.  You and all that stuff
from earlier.  Why go through all that when what I want, what I’m actually
looking for has a tattoo of a crop circle on the top of her left foot?”

“I’m sensing a ‘but’ in there.”

“
But
, none of that is going
to matter unless I make it through the rest of the day without going to prison
or winding up dead in an alley.”

That may not have been the best
choice of words, considering we were just talking about her parents dying.

It’s confirmed when she can barely
get out, “I can’t lose somebody else.  It’s too soon.  Don’t go tonight.”

“I have to.  My ridiculous need to
Ascend got me involved in something much bigger than I am.  And I
have
to trust Forklift to get me out of it.  Regardless of how weird he was acting,
or whatever his motives are.”

“And if he can’t?”

“Then I run.”  Where, I don’t know,
but it’s the only option I can think of, provided I’m not full of formaldehyde
in the Corpus Compendium by Saturday morning.  Then Bingo says something that I
don’t expect.

“You’re serious about me, about Rescinding?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then
we’ll
run.”

***

It takes another two hours for me to
convince her that she’s not coming along for the rest of the journey.  Actually,
I have to force her to accept it.  She insists that she’s not letting me out of
her sight and I keep insisting that I’m not dragging her down with me, whether
into a prison cell or into an urn.  We go back and forth, the points and
counter-points swaying like a metronome. 

She gets huffy when I say that she’s
been too self-destructive for the past year, that it’s time for her to ease up
on that for a while, that she can stay stronger for me by
not
getting
involved.  Then we go for another few rounds.  When we eventually reach an
agreement, we settle on the fact that she’s allowed to be a second-chance getaway
car, parked a couple of blocks down from Wishful Thinking with some provisions
packed, in case anything goes wrong.  I’m supposed to signal her with a wave if
everything is okay when we come out. 

If not, the engine will be running. 

Again, that’s all I’ll allow.  After
that, I’m on my own until I can get back to her.

She says she’ll wait for me if I get
pinched into P-status, but if anything bad happens to me, she’ll track me down
in the afterlife and kill me again.  I get a well-deserved whack on the cheek
when I promise to haunt her if I
do
get dead.

It’s about an hour before I have to
start my shift.  I tell her I need to go, and another small fuss percolates when
I won’t let her drive me back to my apartment, in case a Board Agent is sitting
there waiting on me. 

Bingo stomps into her bedroom and
comes back with a fifty-dollar bill, forces it into my palm.  “You don’t get to
say no to cab fare,” she says, then curses when she remembers leaving her
phone’s battery with The Minotaur.  Another barrage of profanity spews forth as
she rifles through drawers, looking for a replacement.  She gives up, stomps
out her front door and across the hall.  Borrows a neighbor’s phone to call
Ascension Taxi.

A few minutes pass while we wait. 
We spend it on the couch, holding hands in silence.

The driver announces his arrival
with a double-honk.

“And so it begins,” I say.

I move to get up, but she squeezes
my hand, pulls me back down.

“Be careful,” she says.  It’s a
command, not an empty gesture.  She leans over and kisses my cheek, and
somehow, it’s more intimate and meaningful than if she’d done it on the lips.

I leave Bingo behind in her
apartment, hoping beyond hope that she doesn’t try anything crazy that will put
herself in danger.  She’s stubborn enough to ignore everything we agreed to,
and I slog down the stairs with false premonitions of her being handcuffed by the
BAs or Lewis & Clark shoveling dirt onto her lifeless body in some shallow
grave, miles outside the city.

Stop it.  She’ll listen.  She won’t
try anything.

I step out of the downstairs door
into an over-the-top sunny, bluebird afternoon that we don’t see often due to
the widespread pollution.  The storm last night must have pushed the hazardous
haze out of the way for a while.  On any other occasion, it would be the
perfect day to call in sick and go for a long bike ride down Cordes Trail, or
maybe fish for trout that you can’t eat in one of the polluted rivers nearby. 
I try to convince myself that it’s a good omen then hop into the cab.

“451 Bradbury Street,” I tell the
driver, and off we go.

Traffic is light at this time of
day, post-lunch back to work, pre-rush hour home, and the trip should be a quick
one since my R11-2 district is only a few miles away. 

I watch people strolling along the
sidewalk in an attempt to relax, making up stories about who they are, where
they’re going.  Maybe they’re on their way to get a slice of Wishful Thinking’s
Peppered Pesto Pound Cake, or pick up a newspaper, or take the dog out for a
walk.  In my imagination, none of them have anything bad happening in their
lives, none of them are worried about being dead tomorrow, and none of them are
in the trouble I’m in.  They’re happy-go-lucky, and it makes me jealous.  Then,
I see a guy sitting on a bench with a cell phone up to his ear.

Moments manifest memories and one
from last night surges forth.  It’s The Minotaur talking about how the Board
Agents might triangulate
my
cell phone that I’d left at home, that
they’d find me there at some point, if they were looking. 

Back in Bingo’s apartment, when she
was rummaging around, trying to call the cab, I’d been so focused on her that I’d
completely forgotten about
my
damn phone that’s sitting on my
nightstand.  With any luck, the battery died in the middle of the night and
they wouldn’t be able to track it.  What did I say earlier?  Wish in one hand,
spit in the other?

The closer we get, the more my
unease builds. 

What will I do if they’re there,
waiting on me?  Will I tell the driver to keep going, to take me as far as
fifty dollars will get me?  At the rate his meter is clicking higher and
higher, that might only be another mile or two past my place, and that wouldn’t
be far enough.  Stopping at a bank to remove my savings would set off immediate
alerts and I’d be in the back of a BA’s cruiser before I made it a block.