Lurkers Page 7

He rolled his eyes again, which I maintain is a shabby concession of point.

  ‘They’re coming,’ George announced, however unfortunately. I should probably mention, or possibly reiterate, that George when not seething at the sprinkler above his table blurted out random noises without evident reason [his potential schizophrenia notwithstanding], which I’d learned to ignore as well as I ignore the clinking glass and muzak and everything else in a restaurant when I’m writing or, less importantly, talking to people; for that, I wasn’t keeping much track of the muttering and clinking and droning and everything else I haven’t been detailing to date in this story; it just wasn’t relevant. George mentioning that they were coming suddenly edified his relevance in the scenario: HippyGuy, who’d had to turn entirely around in his seat to look at me, turned back to look at HippyChick, Hutch and Chuck behind her, the scenekids behind them, and finally George at the very end, looking beyond everyone at me. ‘They’re on their way,’ George said, with possibly the same undisclosed entities hiding behind the pronoun.

  Leslie returned to the table, smelling like smoke, exhaust, and the end of summer hours after the sun has gone down. ‘Okay,’ she said, dropping into her seat and tossing her cigarettes and lighter next to her Sweet&Lowed copy of Duma Key before noticing that the laptop was closed now, ‘Wha’d I miss.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, opening the laptop and confirming that the cursor was blinking where she’d left off before turning it back to her, ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘You know about them,’ HippyGuy told George, ‘Don’t you.’

  ‘They’ve always been here,’ George said, contradicting his statement that they were coming, to the total cluelessness of HippyGuy. Leslie was looking over her shoulder toward George now.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said, ‘Just read.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, turning back and skimming the page for where she’d left off, ‘Oh. Okay.’ She cleared her throat again and reread the last paragraph before the subchapter had ended: ‘Her Nikes weren’t the jumpboots she’d have preferred, but at least she hadn’t worn heels today; another shake of the TripleA Club, and she launched into a casual jog back toward the remnants of town in which she’d find shelter for the night.’ A deep breath, and she moved on to the beginning of the second subchapter:

  ‘The bank of screens in the war room stopped fluttering in the aftershock and updated with the stream of incoming data: numbers and charts and maps. Jackson fell into his chair and grabbed for the phone.’

  Behind her, HippyGuy turned round again, bumping her with his elbow in the process. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘Just listening in, hearing about the visitors nuking a city they wouldn’t nuke.’

  ‘Ignore him,’ I said, ‘He’s an idiot.’

  Leslie regarded HippyGuy for a second, then shrugged and read on:

  ‘He—uh, that’s Jackson, I guess?’

  I nodded.

  ‘He pounded the hotline button with most of his fist, calling—’

  ‘The hotline button,’ HippyGuy echoed, ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘—office, hoping the building itself remained intact.’

  ‘It won’t be intact,’ HippyGuy said, ‘The visitors’ll have blown it up along with everything else they wouldn’t blow up.’

  Leslie was looking sideways at HippyGuy again. ‘What.’

  ‘Oh, nothing: keep reading this stupid thing.’

  ‘Get away from me, and I will.’

  ‘Whatever.’ HippyGuy fell to the side, slamming his back against the wall beneath the window, no longer breathing on Leslie, but not facing properly in his seat, either; he kept a contemptuous eye on me as she got back to the book.

  ‘The phone picked up. “Jackson! You okay down there?”

  ‘“We’re good,” Jackson told him, “Still here, anyway.”

  ‘“The hell was that, a nuke?”

  ‘“Negative, Sir,” Jackson reported, “Radiation levels remain normal. Some sort of subnuke moab, maybe. We’re still compiling the data on it, Sir.”’

  ‘Probably some bullshit neutron bomb,’ HippyGuy blathered.

  ‘“Can we get any specifics?” Arlington asked, “Find out what the hell they’re using? Defend against it somehow?”’

  ‘Who the hell is Arlington,’ HippyGuy demanded, ‘Man this guy sucks.’

  ‘Arlington’s the guy Jackson called,’ Leslie said to the screen, ‘which you missed with your outburst about the hotline button: “He pounded the hotline button with most of his fist, calling Commander Arlington’s office, hoping the building itself remained intact.” Now shut the hell up.’

  ‘Like it’s my fault no one can follow along,’ HippyGuy mumbled.

  Leslie gave me a look of exasperation instead of bothering to ask.

  ‘Up to you,’ I said, ‘Keep reading or don’t. Eventually the idiot will have to leave to score some weed before dawn.’

  ‘Oh, now you think I’m on drugs,’ HippyGuy said.

  ‘Why not,’ I answered, ‘I am.’ I slurped coffee demonstratively.

  ‘I should tell your publisher you write while you’re stoned,’ he decided.

  ‘Yeah. You should. Make sure to write it down in a letter, upscaling your slander to libel, with a clearly printed name, return address, and—to save time later—the routing number of your bank account.’

  ‘It’s not slander: you just admitted to being on drugs!’

  ‘I didn’t confess to being stoned. Caffeine is a drug. You’ll learn that around eighth grade if you ever drop back in to school.’

  ‘Whatever.’ Also a shabby concession.

  Leslie was staring at the ceiling. Now that it was comparatively quiet, she looked to me again; I shrugged, unconcerned. She took a deep breath and went back to reading:

  ‘Jackson looked over the screens making up the wall. “Preliminary estimates put the blast into the megatonnes,” he told Arlington, “Maybe the tens of megatonnes. Destruction is damn’ near total out there, and’ll probably be total once the fires finish off the buildings.”

  ‘“But there’s no radiation,” Arlington said, “We could get Rescue in there to cover the fires, pull out the survivors. Are there survivors?”

  ‘“No data yet,” Jackson said, “SatRecon over the area remains dark; we’re waiting to get another satellite in place.”

  ‘“Keep at it, Jackson. I’m putting through a call to the president; maybe this’ll get him to endrun that damnable comitatus headache and get the regular army in here to help us out.”’

  ‘Whatever that means,’ HippyGuy scoffed, ‘More bullshit from the writer.’

  ‘Posse Comitatus was enacted in eighteen seventy-eight, following the reconstruction after the civil war,’ I said, ‘That’s what prevented the troops in Iraq from being used in New Orleans in two thousand five, to the total confusion of stupid people; the congress has tried to limit Comitatus in the last couple years with defence authorisation fiscal acts; but, this story set a few years from now, in a country controlled by a fictional president, those acts were never passed, requiring Jackson, Arlington, and other guardsmen to hope that this fictional president will write an executive order to suspend Posse Comitatus and allow the major branches of the military—now what.’

  HippyGuy was giggling. ‘The fictional president. We’ve already got one of those.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, uninterested.

  ‘BamBam stole the election just like Dubya before him.’

  ‘You actually wanted McCain?’ I asked.

  ‘I wanted Hillary.’

  ‘That figures,’ I said, ‘Hitlery Clinton and her strange phobias about power and prosperity.’

  ‘Beats Hussein and his “change you can believe in” which hasn’t changed anything.’

  ‘So, what: you wrote in Hitlery when you voted?’

  ‘I didn’t vote at all,’ HippyGuy said, ‘Fuck that: it was rigged.’

  ‘Maybe that’s part of the reason she lost,’ I said.

  ‘She didn’t lose: BamBam stole i
t.’

  ‘Fine. He stole it. Go tell on him: I’m not a cop.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Can I just read this to myself,’ Leslie asked, ‘instead of getting interrupted every few words.’

  ‘I guess,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll tell you if I see a problem.’

  ‘I see a problem,’ HippyGuy said, ‘I see a big problem.’

  ‘They’re coming to set it right,’ George said.

  ‘I hope so,’ HippyGuy told him.

  ‘You see me,’ George said, ‘I’ve returned!’

  Leslie covered her ears and kept reading.

  HippyGuy, his back against the wall, was staring at George. ‘You were abducted?’

  ‘I was in a dark place,’ George said, ‘I can see again. The repticons did terrible things. To all of us. Like we were cattle. In a cave of light. There were noises. Beep. Beep. Beep. Wonk! Beep. Beep. Beep. Wonk!’

  Leslie stopped reading and looked at me. ‘Nevermind,’ she said, closing the laptop and giving it back.

  ‘Beep. Wonk! And something slithery, like old potatoes, if potatoes could slither, you know?’ George erupted in the sort of laughter you don’t want to hear at night on a mountain road. ‘Squish. Beep. Beep. Beep. Wonk!’

  HippyGuy looked over at me. I told him: ‘Leave me out of it; you two visitards can figure it out between yourselves.’

  ‘Wonk! Wonky, wonk! Wonk! And millipedes the size of stationwagons climbing the walls. But they weren’t walls, because I could see myself through them. See myself like I was before, back on Earth, at the mall. And I cried because I missed the foodcourt and the people and the smells and then another wonk! And then it was quiet for a while until the ducks exploded.’

  By now, the whole restaurant was looking at George. Jessica had stopped, her hand atop my dwindling coffeepot, probably about to ask if I’d been ready for more; now she was just staring at George, mouth still agape but making no sound.

  ‘Boom!’ George shouted, ‘Boom! Boom! Wonk! Duck after duck. All in a line. Duck! Duck! Goose! And the wall behind them with the millipedes but it wasn’t a wall because I could see the ducks in the pond on Earth behind them and boom! Boom! Boom! Wonk! Beep. Beep. Beep. Wonk! Boom! Boom! Boom! Wonk! Squish.’

  ‘George?’ Jessica finally got out, ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘My name was George! Wonk! Hello. Is there still soup left?’

  ‘A...little. It’s kinda grody, but—’

  ‘Boom!’

  ‘I’ll go get you some,’ Jessica promised, ‘There’s some clam chowder left. That okay?’

  ‘Wonk!’

  ‘I’ll get you some coffee, too,’ she told me, taking the coffeepot along.

  ‘Boom! And the watermelons were watching and the wall behind them with a farm and the cows and the pigs but not like us. Not like us with the millipedes and the wonk! And the noises and the sounds and the slithery potatoes but they weren’t potatoes and the clam chowder sounds fine thank you.’

  Staring at George for a moment, trying to make any sense of all that, I opened the laptop and hit ControlN to start a new document, then wrote down what I could remember of his tirade, which you’ve just read to the extent that I was ever able to reproduce it at all.

  EIGHT

  Presuming that you read as much and as quickly as I do, therefore leaving Page Fifty-eight to the left and arriving over here at Page Fifty-nine without stopping to blink, no time will appear to have passed, on your end; here, behind the scenes, where I write these things, I’ve just taken a couple days off to look over the bluelines for problems and approve the last thing I wrote, since it happened to lack any evident problems after all.

  Any problems, that is, with the book itself.

  However unfortunately, that leads me to new problems. Or at least new annoyances. The book ready for release, we’re now entering the silly season in which my publisher as always expects me to go on tour like some meaningless rockstar known only for writing the sheetmusic: malls and standalones, city after city, hanging out in smokefree oubliettes signing a book no one’s yet read, based on a body of work few have read, damning each copy to be purchased now that it’s been written in. It’s a goofy system. Though the increasing number of stores requiring the customer to buy the book before having it signed perform an equally goofy practise, I suppose: See that guy over there? Notice how he looks like the guy on the back of the book? If you buy the book, you can go over and bug him until he writes something unimportant on the titlepage which you can hereafter pretend means that you know each other. That’ll be thirty-nine ninety-nine plus local salestax, please. Would you like a cardboard bookmark with a cat performing anthropomorphised stupidity for an extra eight bucks? Thanks; have a nice consumership.

  I won’t say that I can’t complain, since clearly I can, and do; that in fact I do complain does to a great extent make the books a hotter commodity. I won’t pretend that my interest in writing was ever to produce competition for Dickens, or even just Twain; but the basic fact that, as a writer, I’m functionally a standup comic without a microphone who at the least doesn’t have to wait around for the average idiot to get the joke and start giggling nervously in reaction was never really a basic fact I was in any hurry to accept; add the booksignings, and not only do I get to sit there watching people read, slowly and dogmatically, lips moving as they download the simpler words to their brains until, the datapackets assembled therein, they get to think about it for a moment before laughing dryly: I also get those people now expecting me to say something equally hilarious there in person while I’m signing an unenforceable contract to pretend to know who the hell they are. Though, again, Steve King and his unquantified masses of shouldasaids notwithstanding, I’m actually pretty good at that, if in no way which doesn’t get people interested in punching me. Or, we now know, in shooting me.

  Worse than both, perhaps, in arguing with me.

  Having got his clam chowder, George had calmed down a bit, reverting to the occasional thankalord without mentioning the lizardpeople much.

  Which solved nothing: HippyGuy was still waging peace largely by whimpering about those people entirely unlike himself trying to force their way of life on the uninterested whose right to counterattack was misidentified as terrorism. Which may or may not have included aliens who fix flowers instead of ovipositing monsters into people’s stomachs.

  Chuck over in 73 was being uncommonly quiet, probably because Hutch was being commonly obstreperous. That, thinking about it now, was impressive, since Chuck wasn’t doing anything else: he never brought a book or an iPod or anything to the restaurant; in a sense, he showed up for precisely the reason Hutch showed up, except that Chuck was actually allowed to speak. That night—all night—he was pretty much just sitting there, allowing Hutch to blather on through omission of action.

  The scenekids by eleven thirty were getting tired or bored or for whatever reason out. The three I never really met never really tried to meet me as they wandered past my table toward the lobby; the tolerable one, whose name I guess I never got, slowed to wave casually before catching up to the other three without a further word. That left 74 open for whatever might happen to us next.

  I by eleven thirty had saved and closed Untitled2009 which, obviously, I never did get back to; instead, I had what was now called lizardpeople.doc open and full of George’s insanity, whatever that might later be good for. Which I probably needn’t really conceal: it led to the book you’re reading now; thanks for the $39.99, of which I get less than the total and possibly less than your local salestax.

  HippyGuy was still blathering, largely to HippyChick but loudly enough for everyone else to hear, making me start to wonder whether Table 72 was simply designated through some invisible cosmic justice for the yeckies and the gangies and the hippies and whatever other lunatic fringe could overestimate its importance. Tired of hearing that the government—that weird, alien entity made up of nothing resembling those Americans which had stopped whimpering
about nothingness for long enough to come into power—had thrown $700billion at the überevil criminal global banking federal reserve new world order cartel conspiracy, I went out front for a cigarette.

  A moment later, Chuck joined me, answering my next question before I could ask it: ‘Hutch got caught up talking to Silkwood and Hoffa about...something.’

  ‘He finally found someone willing to talk to him,’ I said.

  ‘Or so much more annoying that they’re not really noticing him at all.’ He lit a cigarette and looked at the road beyond the carpark. ‘Ever get the feeling we’re hurting ourselves more by coming out here to smoke, not from the smoke itself, but from the cars driving by?’

  ‘It’s occurred to me,’ I said.

  ‘What gets me is that, now that we all have to go outside to smoke, that puts us all in the same place at the same time, out in the open air, for the same people who aren’t now inside to walk past and cough all obviously at us to let us know they don’t appreciate us coming out here to where they still are.’

  ‘There’s that. I suppose they forced us out here in the hopes that we’d freeze to death or decide it wasn’t worth it and just quit; instead, they polluted the fresh air they used to escape the smoky buildings to go breathe.’

  ‘I guess the fresh air’s in there now,’ he said.

  ‘Not really. In there, without the smoke, you can smell the dishwasher from the lobby. It gets worse if you go to a pub: everything smells like stale beer.’

  ‘Ugh. Good thing I don’t go to those places.’

  ‘Not that I’d know anything about that: since I smoke, I couldn’t possibly have a sense of smell left. Unless I happen to be naturally better than even the antismokers who seem able to smell and cough over anything from six blocks away.’

  Chuck grinned and nodded, smoking.

  Tired of just standing there, I backed illegally toward the door and sat against the window next to it, resting the back of my head against the glass.

  ‘So, what are you working on this time,’ Chuck asked. Oddly, he was one of those people who never expected a free copy of anything; though, that said, I’m not sure whether he ever bought a copy of anything either.