The Nervous System (11 page)

Good morning, Scarface. How long has the car been lurking? Wonder if I should be concerned. Too fly for Cyna-corp.

Rose clears the street and is moving down the block. My view of her is broken up periodically by the slow flow of workers in and out of the Empire. There's another gaggle of soldiers out front too, Chinamen, looking twodimensional and robotic in their loose poop-brown getup.

The Lexus creeps away from the curb, does a surprise peel out, gunshot loud, burns it westward on 34th.

Rose starts, looks around. Looks back at me. I think. Can't see her face clearly. She turns and I lose her completely in a sudden surge of figures in yellow spacesuits, disembarking an impossibly decrepit Fung Wah bus.

An angry black Hummer swings out from behind the bus. Cyna-corp, no doubt, what with me sleeping … I spin and head back uptown, cussing myself out for not staying sharp. Telling you, those boys will hunt me down, just sand in the hourglass, yo.

Try to look, I don't know, less black or something. More gray. Blend into the concrete.

The vehicle speeds up and rips past me. Whew.

And I'm thinking: maybe I would be better served watching my own back than getting sidetracked by a pretty ass.

_______________

Two-stepping it north up Fifth, realizing I feel good. Back on my grind. Important to have projects, goals, even if they're not immediately clear.

Group of Central American thugs slouching on a corner. One of them gives yours truly an eye-frisk, then returns to his can of Goya beans. Probably trying to figure out what's next after the Chinese gave those beaners the racial high-hat.

Thugs, scavengers, and gypsies every which way. Disgruntled worker bees looking to smash and grab, and who can blame 'em?

A big crash in the sky draws my attention northward, top of the Empire State Building. Something hypnotic about the comings and goings around the tower on that iconic building …

From street level, hard to know what they're doing up there.

I pause.

Yeah, what the fuck are they doing up there? As far as I recall, there wasn't any major structural damage to the Empire. Just the shooting on the observation deck, a replay of the shootings at the same spot way back in 1997. Details are spotty. A lot of people got dead, but that event was overshadowed and sidelined by the larger whole of 2/14.

Reckon blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge upstaged most everything, as dramatic and sexy as a terrorist act can get, even if it didn't quite take the structure down. Highly visual, the exacting distribution of the explosives, boom boom boom. Shit, if you're a career insurgent, where do you go from there? How do you top it? I didn't witness it myself but it must have been some spectacular theater.

Strikes me, concerning the Empire State. As I watch a crane heft a massive girder: they're actually constructing something new up there. On the observation deck, however many floors up. Visible only from above. Maybe from upper floors of the Chrysler or 15 Penn.

Clock the helicopters buzzing around the spire like hummingbirds. Always with the helicopters, be they NYPD—Apaches and Super Cobras—or matte black and unmarked, vibing Roswell, “enhanced” interrogation, secret CIA prisons. The familiarity of such stuff should chill me out, I did enough time in such twilight zones. But it doesn't.

Choppers make me nervous. Ghetto-birds. Always have. Especially now.

Catch myself standing out in the wide open, wrenching my neck backward, spacing out. Sloppy. Time to step. Pop a pill, pull up my surgical mask.

Continue north, trying to put some space between myself and freaky-deak Koreatown.

It occurs oh so obviously that I can't return to the library, as the Cyna-corp crew would surely be up and in my ass in a poker-hot minute. Pause for a moment, unsure as to where I should be headed.

Mere blocks away but it gets quiet in a hurry as I move beyond the construction sites. Dead spooky.

And splat, something gray hits the sidewalk in front of me. Jump back, jack. It's a dead pigeon. Wham. Make that a pair. I look up, slide back against a building.

A third. Smack.

Christ. Even the vermin can't hang on in this void shell of a burg. What the fuck am I thinking, out in the open like this? Looking for a nook to duck into … Get shuffling again. Foot traffic is almost entirely absent. I slide closer to the walls, slip in and out of alcoves. Should get off the street.

Take a moment to sneak another pill. Psyching myself out, it's easy to wander into that headspace. Again I think of snipers, but I have some grounding context now and don't let myself slide down that slope.

Need to cook up a plan. Make some power moves.

Drag about my suit. Try finding a dry cleaner in this fucking beat-down ghost town. You'd think with all these Chinese … but that's straight racist, and this brother shuts that line of thinking down.

One time I got so desperate to get my threads shiny I busted into a boarded-up dry cleaner on Grand Street, way east, disturbing a huge community of raccoons. Raccoons, in a dry cleaner's on fucking Grand Street! Like a dozen of them. Believe it or not.

At the corner of 37th and Fifth I'm trying to determine what's best, cutting down a side street or staying on the avenue.

It's at this moment that I detect color and movement to my rear, and I'm turning, clock four electric motocross bikes nearly on top of me, Jesus they're dead frickin quiet, now sliding to a stop, two jumping the curb and flanking me, the other pair coming to a halt in a showoff-y but elegant V shape, essentially pinning me to the window of a former Citibank.

Reach around and put my hand on my gun. Hold it there as I savvy that I'm confronted with four young punks, teenagers or early twenties, Koreans, all in civilian kit save the one dude I recognize: tough-stuff from the restaurant, hand tattoo, the knuckle-dragger who popped out of the kitchen to defend Rose's honor. He wears hospital scrubs and a hairnet.

So. Mean-looking children with colorful bikes, all of them puffed up aggro like gibbons. I let go of my gun, say: “You kids outta be wearing helmets, y'all know that much.”

I mean it. Not a helmet among them. It's shocking.

“Kim, be chill, I think this monkey is strapped,” says one kid in Korean, hair a stark white-colored pompadour per the current fashion. The street slang sounds stilted in that particular language, old-fashioned.

The hero in scrubs ignores this, says, “Hey, guy. You know who I am?”

Push down my mask. In Korean I say, “Lemme guess. You're either a busboy, or a male nurse in a hairnet.”

Dude flushes up, his boys give a collective
ooooo
… down comes the kickstand and the guy is swinging off his bike, whipping off the hairnet as he rushes me. I figure, fuck it, and pull the gun.

Up in my face, my pistol shoved into his stomach, this kid not giving a fuck. In English: “Uh-uh. I'm the man who cuts off your fucking head and fucks your skull, money. Digs up your moms and nuts on her bones.”

Ah, gangsta speak. This kid fancies himself retro-street American. Points for balls, I do have an automatic weapon jammed into his stomach. I gotta let him down easy.

Note one of his buddies has produced a Glock and has it trained on me, sideways and above his head like this is a video game, like anybody ever really shot someone from said position and didn't wind up hurting themselves. It's no way to hold a gun, who made that nonsense up? And it announces them as ass-clowns, as if the haircuts didn't say it all first.

Still. A gun is a gun is a gun.

Kim breathing on me. He smells like food, cooking oil. Prods me with a finger. Note again that this is a goodlooking dude, beautiful eyes, jet-black hair cut close. Says, “You come up in my neighborhood, start sniffing around our women? Are you fuckin simple? You bring heat and point that shit at me? You must want to die. You're gonna tell me who the fuck you are and you do it fast, best believe I am showing great restraint not ganking you right here and now.”

I'm nodding along. When I think he's done, I respond, “All right now. Let's all take a cleansing breath and recast that energy. Reel it in. Ready? Cleansing breath …”

Close my eyes and suck in a deep one. It stings the back of my throat, dry and granular.

Open my peepers. Kim is giving me a flickering look, trying to maintain his hard bearing, but my weirdness threw him. His buddies swap glances, wavering. Kim rallies. “Yo, are you fucking
laughing
—”

“Namaste. No, listen, for real, Kim, I blame myself, had I done some homework, had I only known that you were the big boss-dog round these parts, I would have come correct with due respect. Bearing gifts, whatever. Chalk it up to my cultural insensitivity.”

“Man, I'm not trying to claim—”

“Cause now I know you're the top man, I see your posse is strong, and I reckon I can talk to you. And hey, I got no need to seek out civic leaders like K-Man or Danny Ya …”

Kim displays serious discomfort, glancing back at his boys.

“Listen, man, yo, I wasn't trying to—”

“Hey, it saves me some time. Saves me the hump. I talk to you and I know I'm speaking to the boss man. Look no further.”

“Not trying to say I'm the boss.”

I pull a surprised face. My gun hasn't moved from his midsection. “I must be reading you wrong, Kim. Is this or is this not
your
neighborhood,
your
women? Cause if that's not what you were trying to communicate, well, shit if I wasn't feeling you all wrong.”

Kim grits his teeth and takes me by the lapel. Hanging tough. “Motherfucker, listen to me now. Did I say I was running things? No. Just consider me, like, a concerned citizen trying to keep my hood clean and shit.”

That makes me smile.

“Ain't no such thing as a clean hood, Kim. Never was. Now come with it, player, I respect your stones, barking at me with my nine in your gut. Due respect. This is your world, and I'm just a little-bitty squirrel. Now if you have your boy put his Glock back in his pants, I'll do likewise and we can talk like fully grown men. How's that sit with you?”

Wanna give the impression that we've got a stalemate here. In truth, I could sort out all these kids in a spiffy jiffy, but an appeal to vanity is never a bad move.

Kim's breathing out of his nose. He holds my gaze for another ten seconds, then tells his flunky to stand down. The kid does it, huffy. Kim moves back a couple strides.

Good faith, I stick my pistol in my waistband.

“Jah bless. That's much more civilized, I appreciate it, Kim.”

Poof. Like magic, a black jeep comes around the corner. I lose focus, cause shit: Cyna-corp beetle-suits standing on the side runner and up in the back, a big-ass .30-caliber machine gun swiveling this way and that, hell, I drop fast. Hoping the haircuts will blind them to much else. Willing them to ride on by.

“Man, what the fuck are you doing?” Kim is looking askance at yours truly. He swivels to clock the patrol.

“Head rush,” I say. “Head rush, just a moment.”

The jeep slides past. I come out of my crouch, shaky. They'll get to me eventually, but the longer I can stave that off … On a positive tip, I'm now pretty sure if I've got any more implant fragments in me, they're not broadcasting my location.

Back to these teenyboppers. “Head rush. You were saying.” Wink at Kim.

Kim cracks his neck and sighs. “Don't get you at all, yo. Man, what you want with Rose, huh?”

“Like the lady told you, we went to Queens College back in—”

“Bullshit, man. You're like fucking fifteen years older than Rose, minimum.”

“Continuing ed, Kim. What, you never heard of that? New beginnings.”

“Bullshit. The sense I got, man, you straight-up cruised her, right there in my house. Then you come flex on me and my boys.”

“It's not like that, Kim.”

“She's my cousin.”

“That's good to know. See, now I know.”

“So I take an interest when armed bitches I've never laid eyes on in my life start dropping by, flexing, you know what I'm saying?”

“Indeed I do, Kim, and you're right to feel that way, though I would argue it's y'all doing the flexing on me.”

Kim takes a breath to continue his rap, glances back at his buddies like he's showing this strange nigger what's up, right, and I spin him around by the arm, smooth, getting out the gun, jerking his elbow up and noting a little snap, easing the boy to his knees, me with my Serb niner up against the back of his skull, super-klassic executionstyle. Except I wouldn't be able to pull the trigger anyway, not with this prop hand I'm wearing. But these boys needn't know that detail.

His posse is shouting this and that. Kim spits, tough stuff, but embarrassingly his voice marks him as poopypants scared.

“Jesus, word to God … fucked up my … fucked up my arm, that's not cool.”

I keep my peepers on his dome, and address his buddies in Korean. “Boys, can you hear Mama calling? Hurry on home now, Kimberly's got detention.”

Nobody moves. Silence save what sounds like a massive pile of metal getting knocked over blocks away.

I sigh. “Or. If you're still here after I count to three, that's an expulsion—for Kimberly. Like permanently. I could give a shit either way. So. One …”

Well, my hand is crying uncle but my thumb works, so I pull back the hammer with a deeply satisfying click, always a scary fucking sound if you're on the wrong end of things. Kim doesn't like it at all.

“Like he says! Do like he says, I'm all right, okay?” says the young Korean. And over his shoulder, “Just chill, word to God, son, I'm sorry if …”

The bucks linger, hesitant.

“Stay right, children,” I say. “Scram.”

“Go, motherfuckers!” Kim screams. They jump to, rev their engines, and split, their softness palpable despite the haircuts and hard looks. Cut hard around the corner, frightened and colorful birds, off and gone and it's me and Kim and the CZ-99.