Virtually True (3 page)

Outside, the street is yawning. A robot cleaner—German foreign aid—scrubs the sidewalk in front of People Protectors, one in a worldwide chain of security equipment stores. Vendors are setting up stalls. Sell flimsy sneakers, pirated video game programs, recycled clothing, perfume, noodles soaking in tripe and peanut sauce, day-old baby chicks fried on a stick. True decides to take advantage of the early hour and record some local color. Maybe save himself the trouble of creaking awake at the crack of dawn sometime.

The wrist-top digitizes, reproduces everything in a 360-degree arc, including himself. True notices a Luzonian beggar in the small-scale gram replica. Young, maybe eleven, her front teeth a little large for her mouth, her cheeks hollow, stomach distended. A tattered t-shirt hangs down and clings to her ankles. True reads the shirt’s motto:
Brown Tasty Cola
, a local soft drink. Free advertising serving as clothing for the impoverished.

She hugs Aslam’s leg and he gently unclenches her. She grabs his pinky with two tiny hands. Aslam leads her to 24-7’s back alleyway where a drunk tourist is relieving himself, a stream of yellow soaking building concrete, unaware of a corpse heaped over a pile of garbage. Something is burning, probably pollution from a factory on a frenetic export drive, melting rubber and plastic for soles in order to meet the insatiable global appetite for sneakers. Or maybe the smell emanates from the wood-burning stoves the Luzonians crank up each morning. It’s possible someone commandeered wood from a factory’s dumpsters, is at this very moment searing toxic waste into the family feed.

True can hear their conversation. She asks for money. Her father is sick. The family starving. They want a chance at a better life. Or is it he’s heard this same woeful tale so often he now overdubs his own dialog? Aslam pats her head. Hands her some money.

The wind whips up and clears the air. True films a street scene—beyond, a church’s burnt-out shell, charred black and long ago stripped of valuables, next to a bomb crater between two low-slung buildings, held together by human ingenuity alone. He walks away from the bar, filming, the holoscreen floating at eye level.

Although his back is turned, True can see the light on Aslam’s wrist-top bleed red and his face drain of color. A flash of light, a surging, stinging sound, jet propulsion, coming around the corner. Aslam tries to leap out of the way, pulls the girl to the ground with him.

A muffled explosion. True watches Aslam heaved against Bar 24-7 brick while the girl, tourist, and cadaver are shredded by the blast; Aslam, due to his bomb-resistant garb, is in one piece. Later, True won’t remember tripping over his own feet as he rushes to Aslam, but the wrist-top records this, as it did his gargling scream. He does remember sliding to his knees, cradling his friend’s head in his lap.

“I can’t breathe.” Aslam gags. A swatch of metal cloth is lodged in his neck.

“I’ll get a doctor.”

“No.” Aslam’s lips quivering, squeezed blue. “Too late.”

“She’ll fix you up.”

“No. Too much damage. Inside.” Aslam shuts his eyes, corners crinkling.

“Aslam?”

A jewel of water rolls down Aslam’s nose, across his lips, drips onto the sidewalk. He looks up. “True, you have to help.”

“Save your strength.”

“The weapon. Not what you think.” Aslam’s in shock. Tries to continue, but True can’t decipher it. Manages, “I’ll contact you. I promise.”

“How?”

“It depends.”

“On?”

“You.” Aslam silently mouths, “God is great.” One last shudder.

There will be no more breaths, no more tears, no more memories, no more wars. Aslam’s life no more. Memories: Aslam saving True’s life, later trudging over veiny Himalayan passes to Lhasa, then Kathmandu. The sensation of sticky blood on his hands urges him to reality. He shakes Aslam, seeks a pulse, signs of life, knows he won’t find any.

True runs his finger along the Ouroboros scar, wonders if Aslam will ever rise again.

Aslam, staring through one eye straight to heaven, doesn’t seem to know.

And True does something he hasn’t for a long time.

He cries.

CHAPTER 2

Nerula’s police station is Luzonia’s last male bastion. Thirteen years of warfare and ethnic strife have whittled away the population of draft-age males, first those between 17 and 35, then 15 to 45, finally anyone over 11. And while these men and boys, in order to carve out a sectarian Catholic state on this clammy Southeast Asian peninsula, surged into the jungle to kill and be killed, the nation’s women remained tied to the land, taking advantage of their growing numbers to wrest control of the nation’s government and businesses.

But not of the police, True thinks. He’s standing with Officer Pidge, five foot nothing, greasy hair resembling the tip of a used Q-tip, knives, pistols, grenades, poison gas pellets pinned to a filthy uniform.

“Bong Bong?” True asks.

Pidge sings. “Bong Bong. Ha ha. Bong Bong.”

Nerula’s chief of police. Bong Bong heads a city-wide baksheesh racket, fleecing tourists, aid workers, and journos alike. No need for surveillance technology because Bong Bong cows Nerulan hotel operators and bartenders; all hustlers, dealers, and beggars; every vendor and copyright pirate. They are his eyes and ears, and for this, they are afforded life. At times the pressure to please Bong Bong is so great, desperate Luzonians are ever-sneaking up on the unsuspecting, slipping small blocks of hash, packets of methyl-A, or wadded up balls of low-grade weed into their pockets, then turning them in.

Bong Bong is squatting behind a desk. He has an oblong-shaped head, weary eyes, and a face riddled in spiky acne. Luzonians say he looks like a pineapple but smells like a
durian
, the local toejam-scented fruit. He’s watching an old rerun, black and white, about a fat Nazi being screamed at by another Nazi called Klink. Bong Bong haws and mutters something. When he sees True, he cups his hands behind his head. Cop casual.

“Come in.” Bong Bong points to one of two chairs.

True sits.

Bong Bong giggles. “No. I change my minds. There.” Gestures to the other chair.

True remains seated, a sideways
z
. Bong Bong launches an aside at Pidge, who harmonizes his giggles with those of his superior.

True’s had enough. “Who killed him?”

Bong Bong’s eyes pop. After a time he snaps his fingers. “Drink?”

True mouths “No,” holds Bong Bong’s eyes; then, allowing the cop to claim this inconsequential victory, averts his gaze. Satisfied, Bong Bong skims an ink-smeared page from his desktop, reads it aloud, slowly, torturously, mispronouncing some words, misusing others. “You have indentified victim by Aslam Qadar Aziz, citizen of Pakistan. Correct?”

True nods.

“When there was this Pak-land. Right?”

True says nothing.

“Muslim insurgent. Enemy of Luzonia. What is an American journalist doing with such a man?”

True remains wrapped in silence, just winging it, looking for the best way to handle things. Thus far he’s drawn a blank. Looks to Bong Bong for inspiration. Finds only nausea.

“Name?”

No point in lying. “True Ailey.”

Bong Bong slides over a crumpled wrapper, flips him a pen, and makes a scribbly gesture. True smoothes the grease-soaked paper—
It’s Bigmcbuffaloburger Day
, it says in spiraling, copyright-infringed lettering—and scrawls his name.

“Not talking-a-tive, eh?” Bong Bong snatches the paper away and Pidge takes his position at the computer console. Bong Bong reads, “Ailey. A.” A pause as Pidge searches for the right letter, then pounds it. Bong Bong moves on. “I.” Pause. “L-E-Y.” Long pause. “Comma. True. T-R-U-E.”

The computer has taken a beating, perhaps due to Pidge’s typing style, less hunt-and-peck than search-and-destroy. The printer sputters, and after some silent pleading from Pidge, spits out what True assumes is his dossier.

Bong Bong reads: “Sixty-seven years old. Occupatient: model. Specialitylizing in lingerie.” True thinks it telling the one difficult word Bong Bong pronounced correctly is
lingerie
. “Now retired, living in England.” Bong Bong snaps his eyes away from the paper—focuses on True. “It says female. You’re not female.” Bong Bong looks closer. “Are you?”

True reads the paper upside down. “It says Trude, not True. He made a mistake.”

Bong Bong bellows a stream of Luzonian invective at Pidge, who retypes True’s name. The screen wheezes then freezes. Bong Bong kicks the computer and it whirs back to life. Lo! True’s dossier. After skimming the printout, Bong Bong reads, “True Ailey, journalist, age-ed thirty-three, employ-yed by WWTV. Hey! I seen you around lots of times. You were a news guy for Indo-Pakistan war?”

“Pakistan-Indian war.” True’s thinking of Aslam.

True’s mind shifts back to driving along the border on the Pakistani side, guns, missiles, tanks poised to fire. A battle on fast forward, True seeking refuge, speeding to a rock face where he runs into a unit of Pakistani soldiers. The steely scent of war; True visualizes himself being tethered to the ground, stretched tightly over quick-sprouting seeds of bamboo, waiting for the blades to tear through.

But that never happened. True is fighting memories now as they impinge on other memories, some true, others just TV stories or fantasies or nightmares. The walls separating them are being breached, pushed to their limit by the stress of Aslam’s death. True battles his way back to reality but can’t shake the image of Aslam’s neck with the lapel of his bomb-resistant shirt razored in, choking his life away.

Bong Bong is talking. “…stupid war. Nuclear bums. And you the only journalist alive from this war. Here in Luzonia, a hero is a man who fights until he dies.”

“A lot of heroes here, then.” The electricity crackles, sizzling meat, lights brown to black and then back to dingy yellow. “Who do you think killed him?”

“Who? This, this—” Bong Bong picks up the paper, “Aslam Aziz? I dunno.”

“How about the girl?”

“How can I know who is she? Thousands and hundereds of girls disappear,
poof
”—he demonstrates—“into begging and prostititution world.”

“If you find out who she is, then you might find out why she died. And Aslam, too.”

“It is not important to me to instigate this Pak. If I seen him here, I kill him myself.”

“If you take me back to 24-7, I might be able to scrounge up a trace of her DNA. Then we could run an identity check.”

“This country has not just concreted a civil war for nothing. You think we have informations like that laid around?”

“How about missing children reports?”

Bong Bong waves his hand lazily. “It’s the story of a lovely lady. Too many,
too
too many, to check.”

“Maybe her parents are looking for her.”

“She could have been absentiated weeks, for years.”

“What about her clothes?”

“I did not seen her.”

“She wore adspace. Brown Tasty Cola. When were those shirts distributed?”

“Situation, a situation is murky, just like your career.” Bong Bong looks over the rest of True’s dossier. “Too bad you did not pay intention to your evocation. I see here you”—Bong Bong curls two sets of fingers to make the point he’s quoting—“suspended for lack of attention—ah, it is attention, not intention, I mistook. Wait. I have commented my faux past, right?”

“Sure.”

“—to work. Ab-sen-tee-ism a chronic concern. Sub
ject
, or is it
sub
ject hospitaled?”