Metro (9 page)

But it is, isn't it? And here they are, strung out on revelations and bad secrets and 100% Real Fruit Juice, sweetened by 100% Real Fruit Juice.

It's about whether you're paranoid ENOUGH.

“Fuck me running,” Andy sighs.

“I'm still calling bullshit on all of it,” Jollie says. “Not until I hear something that makes even a little bit of sense. You said back there that you were Mark, that you've always been the same Mark. But what I see
isn't
Mark. All this gun talk and death and shit—it just isn't you at all. How can a super assassin get high like you do and sell weed and wash dishes for a living while he writes horror stories? I've known you for six years, Mark. I've looked right into your soul. Nobody can lie that well—not to me, not to anybody.”

“It wasn't all lies,” Mark says, fingering the joint in his hand.

“So,” Andy says. “Are we, like, officially on the lam now or whatever?”

Mark sighs. “Yeah, pretty much. I had to deal with a very connected player back there. A guy named Marnie Stanwell. His brother will be coming after us, even if his bosses tell him not to. It'll be personal.”

Jollie gives him a dead stare. “Will Marnie Stanwell's brother find us?”

“Not if we've been careful. The problem is, you never know
how
careful you've been when you have to run like hell on short notice. I smashed the camera they were using, but it could have been streaming video to a remote location. There's just no telling, really.”

“That was your
plan
, Mark? Run like hell on short notice?”

“As you can guess, I was improvising.”

Andy lowers his head, smiling in a strange way. “That's almost a relief.”

“Why?” Jollie says. “What could possibly be
relieving
about
any
of this?”

“Well, I kinda had no idea how I was gonna pay the rent this month. I quit my job yesterday.”

“And you were planning on telling us that
when
, exactly?”

“Whenever, Jollie.”

“You worked at Kerbey Lane for years, man,” Mark says. “They loved you there.”

“Eh, it was a shithole. I was serving hippie food to greasy old housewives and their annoying kids. I dunno . . . I just had to get out of there. I walked out right in the middle of a shift.”

Good for you
, Mark thinks.
Stick it to the man, man.

“That was
your
plan?” Jollie says. “Just walk out and worry about the rent later? You two guys are fucking unbelievable!”

Andy shrugs. “No, actually, my plan was to walk out of there and spend my last fifty bucks in tips on as much booze and dope as I could find, spend about two weeks out of my mind—
then
worry about the rent.”

Jollie leans down from the couch and punches him in the arm.

She instantly feels bad about it.

Mark finally lights his joint. Takes two strong hits off the good hydro. Offers it pathetically to Jollie, who just looks at him funny.

So he takes another hit.

The rush is good and comforting, his survival senses sharpening.

“We can't ever go back there,” Mark says, suddenly very serious. “The House of JAM really
is
scorched earth now. You understand that, right?”

“My
whole life
was in that house,” Jollie says. “My computer, my files—seven years' worth of research and development on all my projects.”

“There'll be other projects.”

“I didn't even get my phone or my wallet out of that mess, Mark. I'm completely cut off from my life. You're acting like none of this is a big deal.”

“That's not what I'm acting like at all. I don't think you've been paying attention.”

“I've been paying
damn close
attention. You've blown into our lives and righteously screwed everything. And here's the really funny part—I don't even know
why
. What was so important that you had to turn my whole world upside down and leave me with nothing but the clothes on my back, Mark? What's the explanation?”

Mark shrugs. “Whatever it is, it can't be good enough.”

“That's not an answer. That's not even funny.”

“I did what I had to save your lives. There wasn't any choice. Anyway, your life isn't really blown up. You still have your cloud, your contacts.”

“And you're still an
asshole
,” she says.

But yeah, he's right. Jollie Meeker is no idiot.

Nearly every important spec of her shit is culled and backed-up in several remote cyber-locations, and she's the kind of girl who can access everything from a pay phone, tons of important numbers and codes burned into her memory like snapshots. You plan ahead like that. For doomsday and all.

But shit, man
.

“I think it's a little exciting,” Andy says, not sounding serious. “Do we get to go in the Witness Protection Program now?”

“We didn't witness anything,” Jollie says.

“Maybe
you
didn't,” Andy says. “But I saw some
shit
back there, man.” Then he laughs. Gallows humor.

Like
It's all over and I know it because I saw some shit back there.

One hundred percent, dude.

• • •

A
fter almost a minute of silence, Mark snubs out his joint on the side of the Black Box and says: “Okay. I'll tell you at least enough so you understand a few things.”

“A
few
things?” Jollie says.

“I'll tell you enough. There's a lot I don't know, actually. It's a big thing I'm a part of. But I can tell you my role in it. I can tell you where I came from.”

So that you know the last five years weren't bullshit. So that you know you'll be safe with me. So that you'll know how I really love you.

He has to let them know that
now
, while they still have time. Before they are forced to move again.

So he tells them a story.

The real thing, the whole thing.

As much as he knows anyway.

H
e never really has a childhood, but tough shit, kid—the world's a very unfair place, in case you haven't heard. We're lucky if we get one shot to be normal.

And what the hell is normal anyway?

His normal life starts in the womb of a teenage girl who gets knocked up on the night of her high school graduation, then gives the kid up for adoption when she realizes she has no money, no prospects, no future. She commits suicide two weeks after having the baby. That happens in Fairview, Oklahoma, where the sky is blue and the traffic is easy, and there's a factory that closes, leaving damn near everybody right up shit creek. Our boy never knows about any of that. He doesn't see the sky there turn black. He doesn't feel the air in town go from cold to colder to deadly. He never knows the agony of the locals who become bums, the tortured cries of the families who go belly up, the slow starvation and the mass migration to bigger cities. That's if you are one of the lucky few who make it out alive. Some of them go back to school, upstate. Some of them become strippers in even smaller shithole towns. Most of them become became career criminals, if they aren't killed during the learning curve by other career criminals. Families with bought-and-paid-for securities and business owners who were strapped into suits of armor the day before become melodramatic punch lines to jokes told years ago. What remains of Fairview's economic infrastructure is gobbled up by the mob, and everything left over is collateral damage—right down to the shops on the main drag, the stores in the mall, the seat covers on the stools of the last bar that never closes, even when the storm finally calms down and reveals nothing but a wasted ghost town full of zombies.

This happens around the country more than you can possibly imagine.

It happens every year.

There are entire sections of America that simply don't exist anymore.

What usually happens next is an elaborate chain of corruption and consequence involving land deals and insurance scams, all orchestrated by smart lawyers and mortgage experts and mob lieutenants who have advanced degrees in finance. The land is renamed and reborn again and again on paper and in the real world. Deeds and trusts and futures are sold to greedy land developers, houses and buildings are scalped one at a time to ghost companies, then resold until the market value triples. And then it gets complicated. Then, they start building something else there and call it the future. Gated communities. Exurbs. Model for new world order. Everybody parachutes out a bazillionaire.

Again, our boy sees none of that.

That's the part of the story he knows nothing about.

The rest is history.

His history.

• • •

A
s the little town he was born in begins to crumble in those first agonized stages of self-destruction, he is shipped from a tiny hospital upstate to a way station in Arkansas. The kid becomes a hot commodity for a few years, bouncing between nurseries and adoption agencies. He's like a movie star with high-class representation in the industry, and they try to sell him to a lot of interested parties. At first the buzz on the street is great, but then it trickles off. He goes from being two years old to three years old, and then almost five, when the agents throw up their hands and stick him in the Has-Been File. It's just bad luck, really. A healthy baby boy on the open market usually burns up the charts at this agency—the kid would go right to a nice rich family in Washington or Oregon and grow up spoiled and privileged. Families with lots of money are the ones who usually adopt, because they've made themselves sterile by being assholes. You know, career people. Or trust-fund brats. The poisoned one percent ruling class. It's easy to lose track of the things that really matter when you have worlds to conquer, and then you realize one day that you're shooting blanks and the doctor says something weird and half-informed, like
It's the stress that did it
, or
Be thankful that you can correct the problem in other ways
and it's, like, what the hell are these people even talking about? Truth is they're selling you something. That's what everybody is doing, all the time. Selling you a car, a house, a life with a precious new baby boy, bought and paid for by the state and baptized in the blood of his own mom.

And again, our boy never knows about any of that.

He never wants to find out because it never seems important to him. Never finds out where he came from because that place just doesn't exist anymore. He never even questions the why of living inside the walls of an institution for abandoned and underprivileged children—it's just the way things
are
. He is silent and invisible. He is frumpy and not exactly attractive—but not an ugly kid either. He is well-behaved and doesn't cry at all. He learns to read and write. He blends right into the generic white-walled world of hallways and classrooms and play areas and lunchrooms and snack times and jungle gyms. He is not anonymous, but nothing special.

That's the quality they look for.

They
, being the people who finally take him away from there.

He is almost six years old when they send a man to meet him.

The man has white hair and a young face, but our boy doesn't know what
young
really is, not yet. Our boy is a blank slate, waiting to be filled. They haven't taught him anything yet.

The man with the white hair sits across from him at a table in the conference room, which is white on white on white—that's how our boy remembers it now, and he remembers it well—and the man says that our boy is special. He is not like other children, not like anyone else in the whole wide world. Most people have
no idea
they're special, the man says. Most people are born into a society that wants to tell them how awful and ordinary they are, how much like
everyone
else
they have to be. They are funneled through a school circuit and a system of government that is corrupt and absolutely unconcerned with what they really
are
on the
inside
. Our boy is still only a child and doesn't really know what most of these words actually mean—but the man with the white hair seems like God to him. Seems like truth, like deliverance.

They take our boy away from the institution that very afternoon, and in the car they tell him that his birthday is tomorrow.

November 12, 1980.

This is the first time our boy ever understands that. The first time he ever sees what a birthday cake looks like, and presents too. It's a small party, attended only by himself and the man with the white hair. It takes place in a tiny room deep inside a place that seems like it goes on forever. He has no idea where he really is. All he knows for sure is that they had to ride on an airplane to get here, then they put a blindfold over his eyes and stuck him in a van and drove for a while, and then they were walking him through open air and the smell of leaves and grass and flowers from a garden were all over him for a few minutes, and then the blindfold came off in the tiny room.

The tiny room is where our boy will spend the next three years of his life.

He will have a birthday cake each November 12.

On the day of his arrival, which is also his birthday now, the man with the white hair gives him a small leather book with one hundred blank unlined pages in it and tells him he must learn to write in that book. Says he will teach our boy what writing is, how language works. His other present is another book, but this one already has words in it, and words are an almost-alien thing to our boy—but only at first.

Soon, he understands that the book with words in it is a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In just three months, he understands everything written in that book. The man with the white hair teaches him personally. He doesn't let our boy watch
Sesame Street
or read funny books with big alphabet letters or cartoon drawings designed to trick young minds—those were at the institution, which never taught him a damn thing beyond his ABCs. No, the man with the white hair says. Your education must be classical. You must be armored by
ideas
, not Muppets. You have to understand the sophistication and elegance of language and the condition of humanity. And your body must be strong, but not
too strong
. When you learn all there is to know about what we do here, when your mind is honed and brilliant, when your hands are skilled and filled with muscle memory, you will still remember this moment, and you will look back on what you were with a bitter chill. You will be reminded of how fortunate you were to be chosen by us. There are only hundreds like you in rooms just this one—all of them learning to read, learning to understand, learning from us.

The man with the white hair looks deep into him.

“You are
one of us
now,” he says.

Be proud.

Be brave.

Be brilliant.

• • •

T
he routine for the next three years consists of one hour's exercise in the morning—walking around an indoor track, calisthenics, and light weight training—breakfast in a big room with four other children his age, with whom he is not allowed to speak, and then five hours of classical education, personally taught by the man with the white hair. No lunch during the day. They don't believe in a midday meal here. Just a breakfast of cereal, fruit salad, toast and jam, milk and juice, and then a big dinner full of meat and potatoes—all at the end of the day, after learning is done.

His progress fits his profile.

He learns very fast.

He learns to write his feelings.

He fills the empty leather book with his own handwriting and is given a new one. On his next birthday, he gets a stack of new books, which are really old books, all by classical authors. He is shown the life and conquests of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. The man with the white hair says that these men are the architects of modern civilization—the stone killers and ruthless warriors who showed the world how easy it is to convince the masses that you are God. The man with the white hair tells him that Alexander the Great was the first leader in world history to have a brutally effective secret police force, and what a brutally effective secret police force actually does. He tells our boy about guerrilla warfare, about straight terror tactics—
shock and awe
, they call it now. Back then, it was purity evolving into mass-hypnosis, evolving into politics. Today, it's complex economics evolving into mass destruction evolving into the genocidal extinction of the human race. He tells our boy that the only way to stop the end of the world is to understand our past and learn from it. And never believe a damn word they tell you up front. Straight perception is not good enough. You must know what lies beneath.

Deception is key.

People wait to be ruled.

The world needs champions like us.

Eventually, his training will be honed to include a comprehensive perspective on the contemporary arts—pop-culture things like movies and comic books. It is the early 1980s when they tell him this. Disco is no longer king and video is about to kill the radio star. It's an exciting new time, fuelled by revolutions in media. Even at eight years old, he understands what all that means. Because the man with the white hair teaches him about the Coming Thing and the Face of the Future. He tells him about computers that talk to each other over telephones. He tells him about telephones that will fit in the palm of your hand. He tells him about George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola and Duran Duran. He says that the face of the new world changes every day, and you must know every trick, every new wave, every trend that will redefine humanity.

Our boy is told by the man with the white hair that he is very lucky to have been placed inside the States and not overseas—because the new technological inventions and the cultures and subcultures and sub-sub-
sub
cultures that come with them will be the most exciting here in America.

No bullshit, kid.

They know that Bill Gates and Ted Turner and the white-collar business pirates who've taken over Wall Street are just years away from revolutionizing/sabotaging the future. They know that Carter and Reagan and Bush are just figureheads for a financial and political system that
sponsors
such revolutions—and, in fact, scalps the best results of all this shit to the highest bidders, all over the world. They teach our boy what a figurehead is, and they begin to tell him about the structures that operate under all that. He learns about government and law. He learns about the true value of money—which is just paper backed up by nothing but blind obedience and faith. Like religion. These are the biggest open-view scams ever pulled on anyone in the history of the world.

And these are still just base lessons. He doesn't have to know
everything
, not just yet. Most important is language and classical education.

Our boy will be a writer—that's what the man with the white hair tells him.

Soon, our boy's head is filled with the philosophies and worldviews of Shakespeare and the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe—he knows that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent qualities of the human race, that it all comes down to weakness and terror, romanticized concepts flying in the face of social contracts that are never quite honored. He's even started to understand how many lies are told to the average American citizen on a daily basis, how these lessons are perverted, subverted, and even mocked by people who know not what they do. Not to mention all those world leaders who live to force every damn man, woman, and child to their knees and keep them in the dark. Our boy begins to feel the weight of his own humanity as it forms in jagged, terrible layers, his soul swimming jaded at nine years old.

And . . .