Punktown: Shades of Grey (5 page)

He never would have volunteered to work two hours late before, but now here he was, driving home in the dark, with some nice overtime to show for his dedication. He was relieved, however, to get away from that nasty little sun-or-moon-faced mockery with its sarcastic, sadistic Cheshire grin. He hoped he had turned its yellow heart a nice shade of moldy gray with all the negative energies he had contentedly projected into it tonight.

The colony city of Punktown at night was like driving through a vast kaleidoscope. An immense holographic advertisement for a new children’s movie had hundreds of ghostly purple teddy bears parachuting endlessly from the pinkish underbelly of the black sky. An old shunt line passed along a tunnel straight through a building that looked like it was carved from one titanic block of translucent amber, while the dome-like structure next door had an exterior like wrinkled, mummified skin (which maybe it was). Mostly humans had settled here, but more exotic races were represented by buildings like that leathery dome, and vehicles like the fin-covered canary-yellow contraption which buzzed so low over Cardiff’s roof that he heard the shriek of brief, scraping contact.

“Son of a bitch!” he barked, slamming the heel of his palm on his console. He stabbed his horn, long and loud. He saw the yellow vehicle drop to his level just ahead of him. In the rear window, a passenger with a checkerboard face of alternating yellow and blue bubbles made a jerking gesture that could only be unfriendly. “Alien freak,” Cardiff hissed. He began to accelerate, as if to ram his hovercar straight into the back of theirs, but caught himself…and luckily the yellow machine lifted again and coasted on ahead to find another gap to drop into.

“Got to calm down,” he whispered to himself. “I’ll get myself shot one of these days.” He had once cursed out the window at a vehicle, only to have a pistol pointed at him out one of its windows, just as a warning.

He had bought a gun of his own, a few weeks ago. He hadn’t told Saundra, his wife. No one knew that he owned it…or that he had brought it to work last week, though he had left it in his briefcase. The next day after he brought it to work, and brought it back home, he had decided he should purchase the Scapegoat.

He made a note to himself to get a smaller version of the Scapegoat for his car, as soon as he could afford to do so.

««—»»

When he let himself into his apartment, Cardiff saw that Saundra sat on the sofa in the darkened living room, her friend Seth seated beside her. Seth hastily withdrew his hand from the low V of her clingy, violet sweater, and sat back from her with a jolt. Saundra, however, cocked her head back to gaze up at her husband blandly. Cardiff had quickly averted his eyes, as if he had been the one who’d been caught, and lingered there in the doorway with his coat and his briefcase.

“I thought you had gone to see your parents, when you didn’t come home,” Saundra said.

He still didn’t look at his attractive wife, embarrassed that he had compromised her privacy; instead, he stared at the VT, where a naked pair or trio of aliens (it was hard to differentiate them) copulated in slow motion (presumably, unless that was their normal rate of motion), with various ecstatic subtitles in several languages scrolling across the borders of the screen. “No,” he murmured, “I worked late.”

“Really? Good. You should work more overtime…we could use the money.”

“Hey, buddy-bob,” said Seth, awkwardly.

“H’lo, Seth.” Cardiff threw a glance at his wife’s guest, raising a palm in greeting. Seth was a co-worker she had befriended, who had been coming over here or inviting Saundra over his place for about two months now.

Saundra’s arm, Cardiff saw, was moving slightly like a pulsing worm along the
back rest
of the sofa. He realized she was kneading the back of Seth’s neck with her hand. “Lena went out with Marisol tonight.” She yawned. Like a cat stretching its long lithe body, she rose from the couch. “You can watch in here…Seth and I will watch in the other room.”

Seth didn’t rise at first; he shot a look from Saundra to Cardiff back to Saundra again. But she tipped her head toward the doorway and at last he stood to follow her from the room. “Okay, so, later on, buddy-bob,” he mumbled with something like amicable apology to Cardiff.

Cardiff nodded. When they had left the room he shut off the VT and went to eat a late supper in the kitchen, leaving Saundra and Seth to watch the smaller VT in the other room, which was his bedroom.

Before he left the living room for the kitchen, however, his eyes were attracted to a greenish glow in the corner. The Whipping Boy, on a little table, like some sardonic voyeur, its court jester’s face gleeful. Seeing it there, Cardiff was paralyzed with a fury so great he could have walked over to the thing and flung it out the window. Bloody wretched toy, gloating.
That superior, cruel humor glinting in its mascaraed eyes.
What sick freak had ever penned the original of that face? Cardiff thought that he’d like to stick a knife right into its forehead…and then, perhaps, into the forehead of the artist who had drawn it.

««—»»

When the vidphone rang, Cardiff awoke on the sofa with the VT running again, quietly. He had been watching a very old Earth movie (it was in black and white, even) called “Schindler’s List,” which was quite sad, and he supposed he should have felt scorn for those uniformed Germans but he was too continuously distracted instead by the disdain he felt for that peeping-tom jester in the corner. Yet he had dozed off at some point, and when he went to answer the phone now he wasn’t sure if Saundra and Seth were still in the bedroom.

On the vidplate was a stranger, a gaunt-faced Detective Bell from police precinct 15. He had bad news, he announced…and within minutes, Cardiff was on his way to Precinct House 15, without having rapped on his bedroom door to let Saundra know where he was going, or what had happened…

When the attendant pulled the drawer open, Cardiff stared down at a teenage girl with her mouth in a weird little smile and a greater smile grinning at her throat.

“That’s Marisol,” Cardiff whispered, almost in a faint. “Lena’s friend…”

“Idiot,” Detective Bell hissed, nudging past the bungling attendant to slide the drawer in, and slide a second one out.

“Oh God, oh no…my baby…my little girl,” Cardiff sobbed instantly, and Bell caught him as the attendant scrambled forward to glide the drawer away again. Cardiff saw his daughter’s long black
hair,
matted and glued with her own blood, vanish through a caul of tears.

“We have three boys in custody already,” Bell told him, still holding onto his arms. “We’re pretty sure they’re responsible. They were pumped up on buzzers when we brought them in, and one of them has a record of previous sexual assault…”

“Sexual assault,” Cardiff echoed, gasping for air. “Sexual assault…my baby…my little girl…”

“I know,” Bell told him. “I know.”

««—»»

Cardiff was given three days off from work. He made a vidrecording of the single mention of his daughter’s murder that he witnessed on VT. They might not have bothered at all had Lena and Marisol not been so pretty, so photogenic, even in death. They showed a vid of his daughter’s body splayed in some parking lot where she had been found, even showed a close-up of tiny red ants swarming on her bare belly around the navel that Cardiff had kissed to tease her as a toddler. Then, they showed the three young men brought into court for their arraignment. They were all three of them short, slender, crewcut, such a mix of ethnic groups they had become no ethnic group at all, like a distillation of the worst of every race and culture. One of them rubbed away tears in his eyes. After he made the recording, Cardiff played it back, and froze on the face of this crying boy. He was crying for himself, not the two girls he had slain. Not for Lena.

But worse than the crying boy was another who smiled. He even looked directly into the camera, and hence directly at Cardiff, and smiled. Cardiff froze on his face the longest. He studied the boy, waiting for something other than sadness to come.
Something other than anguish.
He waited, as if he couldn’t remember what else he might feel, as if he were trying to remind himself why he was even looking at this smirking stranger’s face.

At last, unfulfilled, he shut the VT off. And with its glow extinguished, a subtler luminosity caught his attention.

“You!” Cardiff bellowed, leaping instantly to his feet. He aimed his finger at the evil imp’s green circle of face. “You think this is funny, fucker? You think this is all a big joke? Huh? Huh?” He started toward the thing, his hands like an eagle’s talons.

Saundra and Seth came in from the other room, having heard his outburst. Saundra’s eyes were red and Seth had been comforting her.

Cardiff glanced over his shoulder at them and then turned instead to the door, leaving his apartment.

««—»»

When he returned to work after the funeral, Cardiff had bought a small hate machine for his car, and an even smaller one with a flip-open lid that revealed a red clown’s face, which he carried in his jacket pocket. He would need to have this one on him when he went to the trial.

He had been working for several hours when he remembered the photo of Lena he had hidden in his drawer.
Drawer like a morgue drawer.
He immediately fetched it out, gazed at it.
His baby girl, chewing on the rubber hand.
He smiled. Tears rose to his eyes. And he pinned the photo to the gray padded wall of his cubicle.

When he returned to work the next day, the photo was gone. Not turned to face the wall. Gone.

He found it soon enough in his drawer. That didn’t matter. It had been removed. He even thought he saw a new smudged thumbprint rudely on the gloss of the photo itself, like the fingerprints those three boys had left on his beloved child’s flesh.

He had begun carrying the handgun in his briefcase again, starting yesterday, his first day back since the murder. He did not know why. Only that he felt better carrying it around with him. And now, he placed his briefcase before him on his desk. The lock opened with a satisfying clack like a gun’s slide being worked back, a clip pushed into a handle. He lifted the weapon from inside, like a distorted pearl from inside an opened oyster, a pearl that had formed around an irritating grain of sand, a core of hatred. It felt so good in his fist, like a collapsed star of pure hate, a teaspoon of which would weigh many tons—a whole gun forged out of such metal.

He sat there holding it, ogling it, a long time. And as was her talent, Ruth came into his cubicle, sensing that he was not at work. Her deep voice was already rasping forth…but it caught on the gravel in her throat at the sight of the silvery gun.

Cardiff rose to his feet sharply. He pointed the gun at her face. At her widening eyes, just inches away from the muzzle…

But he hesitated, confused, as if he had suddenly forgotten who he was. And if he couldn’t remember who he was, he couldn’t remember why he wanted to kill this woman.

Why should he kill her? What had she done? No, she was not the real enemy. She was not the true source of his misery.

No. He turned, instead, to point his gun at the happy, evil sun/moon face of that hideous infernal machine on his desk.

Ruth darted away as Cardiff opened fire. He barely noticed her, and couldn’t have cared less. He fired shot after shot into the little machine of tarnished silver, shattering its orange face, its demonic grin.

He heard screams, running,
an
alarm for security. Tears streamed down his face.
Tears of great, crushing sadness.
But also tears of joy, of triumph…for Cardiff saw, fallen out of the decimated hate machine onto his desk, its tiny and utterly withered heart.

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