And Sometimes I Wonder About You

44

The sign read LANNY’S EATS but everyone who went there called it Smokers. It was the last place in Manhattan, that I knew of, that encouraged its customers to smoke while warning away those who somehow felt that there was a loophole in the Death Clause that came with each and every human body. The front door, on far west Christopher Street, opened onto a long corridor that was usually filled with tobacco smoke; this because the vent fans from the dining room blew through there. At the end of the hall was a sign that actually read GIVE UP ALL HOPE YE THAT ENTER HERE.

I had not asked Bug why he liked to go to Smokers. He had never smoked and, before he turned Mr. Universe, he never even went out. I figured it was a reaction to how much his life had changed since he’d met Zephyra. He didn’t want to believe that he’d given up a life of pessimism for love.

Given my druthers I wouldn’t have ever gone there. I don’t smoke but I love smoking. Sucking on a cigarette and letting the smoke waft up from my mouth into my nostrils made me feel invincible. But boxers in training could not put that kind of strain on their breath. I had been on the treadmill my whole life and so smoking would have to wait until I died.

After spending half an hour at Smokers I had fevered dreams filled with coffins and Lucky Strikes for days.

The floors and ceiling were painted white and the walls tar-black. Lanny Marks was the server and his brother (also named Lanny) worked the kitchen; that way no employee could sue them for health issues later on.

“Can you imagine somebody suing you over gettin’ sick?” Lanny the cook asked me one off-night when Bug and I were the only customers. “Everybody dies is sick first. You could kill somebody by kissin’ ’em or steppin’ on a toe and givin’ ’em a blood clot. I swear one day they gonna have a fine for BO.”

Bug was at a white table in a black corner eating pastrami and drinking a milk shake. He was hunkered down over the meal, looking like the runt of the litter that had grown into a timber wolf.

“Bug.”

He gazed up at me, unconsciously raising a hand to protect the meal.

“LT,” he said. “You didn’t say if you heard from Z.”

Young men and their virgin hearts. Bug had only fraternized with escort service girls before Zephyra, so now all he could think about was her and how he was bound to lose.

“She left a voice mail,” I lied, “saying she was on vacation.”

“Bitch.”

“What you got for me, B?” I said.

I pulled out a whitewashed chair and sat.

“What can I get you?” Lanny the waiter asked.

He was a ruddy-white and my height, so I liked him.

“You got that chicken rice soup today?”

“Every day.”

I nodded and he went off.

In the meanwhile Bug pushed away his sandwich, pulled a square and flat panel from a large leather bag at his side, and placed it at the center of the table. The white glass tile was maybe three times the size of an iPad. Bug touched a corner that didn’t look any different than anyplace else on the glassy rectangle. A bright light rose up from the surface, constructing what I can only call a pyramid of light above it. Rather than blocks of stone, this form was made from multicolored letters, words, images, and lines connecting them in horizontal, slanted, and vertical paths.

The topmost word was “Jones.”

There were eight other tables in the smoke-filled restaurant; three of these had two or more nicotine-addicted customers.

I looked around but Bug said, “Don’t worry, LT, in order to see this you got to be within three feet and you have to look at it straight on.”

To test this claim I stood up. The words and images blurred into pleasant pastel colors before my eyes. I took three steps away and the colors muted even more.

“In ten years every house in the civilized world will have 3-D TVs like this in the living room,” Bug said when I was seated again. “I hear there’s a sheik in Qatar and an Internet mogul in China got whole ballrooms made from panels like these. Not only will you be able to watch the movie, you’ll be able to get inside it.”

“Pretty great scientific tool,” I said aloud. “You could actually postulate a molecule and then get inside it to see what you thought wrong.”

“Wow,” Bug said. To him I had been a brute until that moment.

“Nice lights,” Lanny the waiter said as he put the soup down in front of me. “But don’t turn up the volume.”

“Tell me what we got here,” I said to Bug when Lanny was gone again.

Bug smiled and I knew I was in for a frightful treat.

“Fourteen hundred and sixty-two names active,” he said. “Those are the names in red. There are other names but they’re coded either inactive, blue, or closed, black.”

“What about all these shades of green?” I asked, not needing any explanation on “closed” files.

“Those are what the system calls tasks,” Bug said. “A task could be a robbery or the end of the line of a smuggling run. The shade of green is judged by the time that the task is expected to happen. The darkest ones are in the next twelve hours; the lighter to lightest are sometime later than that. I don’t show anything happening more than a week from the system clock.”

“Damn,” I said. “There must be three hundred tasks listed.”

I wanted a cigarette.

“Two sixty-seven,” Bug said. He took a sip from his milk shake straw.

“And these lines connecting green tasks to red names are telling us who is expected to be involved?”

“The solid ones,” Bug averred, “and the lines made up from dashes are probable participants.”

“Is the when and where in here?” I asked.

“Mostly. It’s a beautiful system but it’s like he was never afraid of being hacked. There’s no firewalls whatsoever.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Jones figures either he can blackmail or kill anybody try and use this against him.”

“He’s got the army for it,” Bug agreed. “He must have sent one of his kids to MIT or something. This work is beautiful.”

“Here’s your pie,” Lanny said.

I hadn’t heard him come up. He was holding a pink cardboard pie carton by its string handle. Bug took the box and said, “Can you put the whole thing on my bill, Lan?”

“Sure, David. No problem.”

“What kinda pie?” I asked when we were alone again.

“Um... It’s nothing, man. Lemon meringue. I put it in the fridge and take a slice now and then. That’s all.”

His words were an entire history of compensation and loss — the bookkeeping ledger of a young black man’s soul.

“How much information you have on the red names?” I asked to cover the epiphany.

“Almost everything. Addresses, cell phone numbers, even birthdays. There’s also a history list of the ‘tasks’ they were involved in.”

“Take the data from this pyramid and print it out like a report. Have it delivered to my office.”

I put my black hands on the white table, ready to rise and run.

“What about my question, LT?”

I sat back and gazed at the butterball who had exercised himself into the form of a demigod. He was still a child in my eyes. It struck me that Twill had never been that innocent.

“Why you got explosives knitted into every wall in your house, Tiny?”

“For protection.”

“That’s right. You know that you got a house full’a treasure. There are things you know that nobody else does. That’s valuable and dangerous.”

“So?”

“Now think about Zephyra. She can go out with sheiks and kings, princes and billionaires, but she took you.”

“And she still goes out with them.”

“And so you hit the detonator and blow it all to shit. Live with it, brother, or find a new way.”