Watchlist (44 page)

First thing we did was whoop it up. Then we showered and set out for the women's barracks to get it on. The women had had the same idea. We collided over the mortar range, which was dry and pockmarked and not ideal for fucking, but in the party that ensued we all got laid except Taylor, who despite running fifteen miles a day could just not stop being fat.

Taylor's fatness was a joke at first, when he couldn't keep up, but soon the joke became myth. We punched him on the pretext that he couldn't feel. A lady soldier half wearing my camo rode me in the hot dead grass, and I saw Taylor taking shade under the only tree, massaging feet that must have hurt like hell under all that weight.

The party depressed me after two days. By then I honestly couldn't believe I was me. I hiked to the airbase and hitched a plane to Jersey. Except it was resupply to Jersey the goddamn island. I got to London and fit a southie crew that mugged tourists in the Elephant and Castle pedways. Other gangs raped down there; we mugged. We'd rip cams and phones from helpless fingers to fence in Camden for hash. I beat up an Italian for his hat.

Hash didn't go far. Kyle burned through it so quick that we had to keep pace to smoke our share. My name is Kyle too, so they called me Kyle the American. Didn't like sharing my name, not with a gobshite who smelled of rotting vegetables. When the hash went, a game began: first to say “Morely's,” the name of the foul kebab stand, had to walk down there and buy kebabs for all.

“Cah need another hit,” Aliza was explaining. “Sorely.”

“Ap!” Vernon pointed, and the rest of us shouted also, except Kyle the Englishman, who'd pushed a drunk banker in front of the Jubilee that day, fled into the two o'clock drizzle, all of it on CCTV.

“What,” Aliza said. She wrote poetry that I read when she'd gone, because I am a sensitive monster. It was okay. The whole UK was okay, except for a low and troubling drone in my head. Anything not loud was a whisper.

“You said . . . it,” I said.

“I didn't say Morely's!” she cried.

O, we howled. Howled more when she returned with kebabs. It plays in the mind like I was howling at this weeks later, well after the gang dissolved, when I was tackled and hooded in Paddington by men I never saw. I thrashed and screamed it was just panhandling, but the hood was soaked in fumes and it was a purple bloom that answered.

“You're awake,” I was told. I tasted my snot and spat. It hung inside the hood with me. The bustle of Paddington had silenced. Ears felt pressure: we were in the air.

“Son, relax. Not so bad as that. Just there's protocol for recovering property. You ain't the first, and it's worse if we don't scuttle.”

“Not your prop, Yankee cunt.”

“Oh Jesus,” the other man laughed. “You didn't pay for that accent coach I hope.”

“Son,” said the nice one.
Son
. Didn't load me up or push me out and I don't like the ones who did. My sister was into the money machine, she was set. I had a cousin who played pro tennis. Me, I was swimming in my own skull, no idea who to blame. “Face it. The company
trained
you. They own what's there, see? Invested.”

I decided I wouldn't speak. We landed and shuttled to a camp that from smell I'd say was downwind of Philly. Looked around and if I looked as sorry as this lot I was sad: everyone had a black eye or slung arm. None could meet another's gaze.

A drill sergeant came into the tent and told us we were deserters, degenerates, subhuman retards for supposing the military disbanded in peacetime. Deserter with some teeth knocked out said he'd been discharged for self-harm. They hauled him off and told us to wave good-bye for good.

We were too tired not to.

The weird passed again into normalcy. There were meals. The exercise was good, body juiced at the lack of dope. I shared a triple bunk with Wilt and Johns, always together and much alike, so I never clicked who was who—we were pals. After we'd got some shape back they fitted us for flamethrowers. It was fun torching the straw men, but our fuelpacks weighed a motherfucking ton.

Job was to penetrate some pines and flush out the ferals who lived there. Halfway through, the officers stopped calling them “ferals” and starting saying “mud eaters.” The mud eaters, inbred swamp trash that walked on all fours, had killed a resource exploration crew. With rocks.

The story made us mad. Wilt or Johns said they put drugs in the food, a dose of giddy insomnia. Johns or Wilt disagreed with Wilt or Johns, said they put a hard drive in each head they buzzed. I had to admit, the barber nicked me bad. An elsehood had driven me since, some cloud of simple demands.

We slogged through muck with flamethrowers and chased whatever ran. The muddies didn't eat mud; they were covered in it, camouflaged. Wilt and Johns, walking shoulder to shoulder, had a snake pit open under their feet. By the time we got a rope down, the bodies lay together, puffed with poison.

A fox shadowed me for a whole day's march. Except that was back in London . . . The animal had trotted soundlessly along a low stone wall that bordered the gardens of Borough High, perfectly happy to stroll at my side. The sun was the sun the day my brother got into Canada, so bright and close it went through the leaves. We flipped a coin and it rolled into a storm drain, so I told him to hop in the trunk.

It's true I was beyond sleep, but this was a bit much.

Adults couldn't be taken alive. A TV show laid claim to captured kids. We saw a taping as reward for abundant kills and captures. Behind the waxen flesh-colored host sat a wall of acrylic glass. Behind that: adolescent savages fought predators and extreme artificial weather as though their lives depended.

A female unit was half the audience, so the hour was seized by handjobs and clit rubbing. At one point a girl I'd yanked from a tree—receiving a kick in the larynx—ignored the fire-making tools and stood there in her frosted chamber, gazing over the moany lot.

I went around bleachers to the rear control room. The man and woman inside didn't see. They weren't talking about my muddie, down there on the stage. Woman worked the panel while the man just watched.

“Thought we could offset the cost of short-life organic LEDs with energy savings,” she said. “They're efficient but decay fucks it up.”

“You say organic?” the man wanted to know.

“Next-gen won't rely on polyanilines in the conducting layer.”

God, I could have strangled them for saying these things, but I blacked the fuck out somehow. Rebooted choking on an oxygen tube they were trying to shove in.

“Hello, never mind,” said one of the doctors. The tube slid out. I rasped and retched a bit and rolled over on my side. The room was silver. I glitched out again.

The world underneath me tilted. A boat. Some boys were huddled off at a porthole, discussing where the boat was pointed. South, they mainly agreed.

“Word banged round the muddies had a natural cancer defense, insurance lobby said wipe out.”

“Christ. Extinction duty.”

“How far you bolt, Saul?”

“Vancouver. It was beautiful. Did a hooker and she came in three languages. They caught me at the zoo watching penguins.”

“Look who's up.”

“Ey,” I said. “Real penguins?”

“Real enough, buddy.”

Destination we heard topside: Nicaragua. Vessel a destroyer, the USS
Spangled
. Here to dismantle the Zero Cartel with
local cooperation.
Commanding officer touched his face, hid beyond it. He dreamt of a classical democracy that worked, that was not crippled by its weak. If he could strike us from history, fine.

First run became a classic botch. Signal flew; we opened fire on a salvage tub and killed four civilians, one pregnant. Smuggling themselves up Mosquito Coast. We waded through their sorry possessions.

“They shouldn't've,” the commander began, confused. He never told us his name or rank, paranoid even for his kind. “Insurgents.” He had us heave bodies overboard.

“Sir?” I said. “There's a war?”

“Agitators in the wild, that's all.”

Plain old rogue economy, working places the capital couldn't. And the villagers were loyal. When we landed in a port town, it was to explode their illegal lobster fishery.

“Don't think so,” said Saul before he swallowed the charge that splattered the deck with his self. Almost did the same but for some alien snag in my action. It was curious, now: whatever I saw or touched—ocean spray, my own hands—I sensed a simulation.

Cargo flowed out of the rain forest in canoes, shielded by triple canopy that satellites couldn't see through, into open water. We floated at jungle's edge in skimcraft, hoping couriers might blunder at us. Finally some wake. We thought the fins were sharks. Dolphins, it turned out.

“Been getting aggressive,” our captain said. They began to breach as gray liquid missiles, knocking men into the water with their tails so that others could drag them down to expire beneath the waves. One landed square on the deck, flipped about, snapping her nubby white teeth.

No, this never happened. I was gone.

Wrong: I was here, reaching for a white preserver. They pulled me out of a life, they must have, though nothing about that life would assemble. I was crushed under the weight of things or falling through their total absence.

You'll stay, a distant quarter of me said. You'll steer out. You do not want for courage.

I crawled around the kamikaze dolphin to the dash. I threw the accelerator, and soon we slammed into beach, where two or three of us climbed over the prow and lay breathing on the sand.

It was tropical night when one of us spoke.

“I'm for disappearing.”

Waited for my own agreement, but I was disappointed.

“Your call,” said the disappearing man. The jungle swallowed him.

The stars: how I hated them. A star doesn't have to know itself.

That faraway part of me spoke again, a subzero voice that echoed down the spine. It said I had rested enough, and to run. Back toward some rendezvous, an outpost—the loving arms of the company. But what did this voice imagine running to be? Did it really suppose I could
run
?

We wouldn't ask if you couldn't, it said. You do magnificent work.

You are one of a kind.

ANNOUNCER:
You are about to enter the courtroom of Judge Judith Sheindlin. The people are real. The cases are real. The rulings are final. This is Judge Judy. Sakshi Karnik is suing her ex-girlfriend, Lola Zee, for the balance of a loan, and an assault. Lola says the money was a gift.

BYRD THE BAILIFF:
Order, all rise. This is case number 109 on the calendar in the matter of
Karnik v. Zee
.

JUDGE JUDY:
Thank you.

BYRD THE BAILIFF:
You're welcome, Judge. Parties have been sworn in. You all may be seated. Ladies, have a seat please.

JUDGE JUDY:
Miss Karnik, according to your complaint, you and defendant used to be in a relationship, and while you were in a relationship, you loaned her an amount of money for the purposes of some sort of—event. Soon afterward, you broke up. You would like your money back for that and also payment for some damaged property. You also claim that the defendant assaulted you, and you feel like you endured a lot of pain and suffering, and also you needed some treatment, so you'd like compensation for that as well.

Sakshi Karnik
: That's correct, Your Honor.

JUDGE JUDY:
So before you broke up, you were in a relationship with Miss Zee for how long?

SAKSHI KARNIK:
Yes, I—

JUDGE JUDY:
Please speak up, I can't hear you.

SAKSHI KARNIK:
Two and a half years, Your Honor.

JUDGE JUDY:
Can you please tell me, first, about the money that you loaned her.

SAKSHI KARNIK:
She asked me for money to throw a party.

JUDGE JUDY:
A party? What kind of a party?

SAKSHI KARNIK:
A birthday party, Your Honor. In her honor.

JUDGE JUDY:
And when was this?

SAKSHI KARNIK:
July 7, Your Honor.

JUDGE JUDY:
July 7 of—what year?

SAKSHI KARNIK:
Last year.

JUDGE JUDY:
Go on.

SAKSHI KARNIK:
And she said she wanted her guests to have everything. She wanted to afford them pleasures. And so she sent me away to buy them, the pleasures.

JUDGE JUDY:
She sent you—to the grocery store?

SAKSHI KARNIK:
Yes, Your Honor. She wanted game hens. Cornish game hens.

JUDGE JUDY:
So you bought her groceries?

SAKSHI KARNIK:
Yes, Your Honor.

JUDGE JUDY:
And you brought them back?

SAKSHI KARNIK:
Yes, Your Honor. I bought and brought them. Cornish game hens. Sage. Honey. Salty cheeses. Fragrant pâté. Vodka. Feta-stuffed olives. Not blue cheese because why do you hate me, do you hate me? Do you wish me dead? Flustered potato chips.

JUDGE JUDY:
Ruffled potato chips?

SAKSHI KARNIK:
Those too.

JUDGE JUDY:
Then what?

SAKSHI KARNIK:
She glazed the hens. She glazed them with oil, roasted them in the oven. She cut them in half with her shirt off. Her breasts were—

JUDGE JUDY:
Excuse me?

SAKSHI KARNIK:
She cut into them with kitchen scissors. Into their breasts. Their bodies all grease and tendon and whistle-slicked. She wrestled with their gristle until they were vanquished. Flecks of salt and oil on her skin. In half. She cut them in half. Then she folded them together and let the sides drop down like a trap, released. You understand.