Nuclear Jellyfish

NEXT DAY

The conference room was cavernous and perfectly square, half the size of a football field, far too large for the current Function, making its lack of attendance seem even more so. Exhibitors tended merchandise at folding tables along the walls. The middle of the room was no-man’s-land, an expanse of high-durability carpet that remained empty except for the occasional customer cutting diagonally across for the exit. Droning ducts in the twenty-foot ceiling over-pumped air at a perky sixty-eight degrees.

Three tables sat in the back of the hall by the service exit, the worst possible retail location. Behind them, Steve, Ted and Henry stood silent and idle in an unintentional line. Their tables supported a series of locked glass display cases that nobody was looking into. Mercury dimes, Indian-head pennies, Franklin half-dollars. The trio’s arms stayed firmly folded as they glared across the room at a cluster of customers gathered around prime real-estate tables near the entrance.

“Stamp-collecting fucks.”

“Look at ‘em all smug with their pussy first-day covers and upside-down airplane misprint cocksucking-“

“Shut up,” said Steve. “This is all your fault.”

“Why’s it my fault?”

“Those were supposed to be our tables,” said Steve. “How’d you let this happen?”

“They were there when I arrived.”

“The tables had reserved numbers.”

“They just grabbed ‘em.”

“And you let them?”

“Already had their supplies set up.”

“So shove those adhesive hinges up their ass!”

Ted looked at his watch. “Thought about lunch?”

“Cafeteria here stinks.”

“Your turn to make the takeout run. I’ll watch the dimes.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“What?”

“Don’t look now.”

A gloating man savored his stroll across the middle of the carpet. His tropical shirt had a pattern of airmail postage through the ages. He arrived at the tables and smiled. “I hear it’s Sh-teve now.”

Steve reluctantly returned a nod. “Gary.”

“When’s the nose bandage come off?”

Steve just stared.

Gary solemnly shook his head. “Terrible. Absolutely terrible. What’s happening to this country? That’s what I told the guys when I first heard. It was a woman, right?”

“You have any business here, or are we just wasting oxygen?”

“What’s the matter? I can’t come and say hello?”

“You just did, so why don’t you go-“

Gary looked down. “Nice threads.”

Steve winced. He knew he shouldn’t have worn his buffalo-nickel shirt.

“So,” said Gary. “How are nickels moving these days?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“You’ve obviously been out of the loop. We don’t do buffalo nickels anymore. But I guess they didn’t get the word to you over in pretend collecting land.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I think you know what it means.” Steve walked out from behind the tables.

Gary stepped up to his face. “Why don’t you tell me what it means?”

Dugouts cleared. The rest of the coin and stamp vendors poured in from around the hall, encircling the two.

“Maybe I will tell you.”

“Then tell me.”

“Make me.”

“What if I don’t feel like it?”

“I’ll bet you jerk off in that stamp shirt, don’t you?”

“Motherfucker!”

Ted jumped between them. “Guys! Guys! …”

The glass facade of a massive downtown convention center sparkled in the midday Jacksonville sun. Two men approached the front entrance. The plumper one sipped a quart beer from a brown paper bag, and the taller read a computer printout: INTERNET JOB FAIR. Serge opened the door and stepped into air-conditioning.

“Whoa,” said Coleman. “Check the size of this place! I didn’t realize the Internet had so many work-at-home jobs.”

“Better than my wildest dreams,” said Serge. “We’re guaranteed to find super-high-paying gigs in a place this huge.”

They headed across the lobby for the main exhibit hall. A registration desk sat just inside. A woman dressed entirely in tight leather with shiny rivets looked up from a sea of carefully arranged name tags. “Can I help you?”

“More like, ‘Can I help you!” said Serge. “We’re ready to start immediately. I bring to the table alarming sleep patterns, world-class daydreams, an unwilting tolerance of lawn statuary, and sensible shoes. We’d like something in the six-figure range please.”

“I don’t… understand-“

“Our new jobs!” said Serge. “When I heard about your show, I told Coleman, ‘These are our kind of people!’ Not like the others who call police when the first little buffet table tips over on the outgoing president. Not my fault the water in those steam trays was too hot.”

“Sure you have the right show?”

“More than ever!” Serge energetically flapped his computer printout in the air. Then he stopped to appraise the woman’s leather ensemble and gothic tattoos crawling up her neck. He leaned forward, placing his palms on the edge of the desk. “Say, is this one of those porn sites where we have to install twenty-four/seven cameras throughout our house with no blind spots so fringe players can watch Coleman take a dump?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Internet Job Fair!”

“Internet?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard about it. Very big.”

“This isn’t the Internet Job Fair.”

“It isn’t?” Serge looked around the hall, velvet ropes surrounding dozens of stunning motorcycles. Gleaming chrome forks and gas tanks airbrushed with flames and winged skulls. First-place ribbons, gold trophies. He turned back around. “Then what strange existence is this?”

“Southeast Regional Chopper Expo.”

“I thought it was just the motorcycle section of the Internet.” He showed her his printout. “Says today’s date and the convention center.”

“It’s a big building. Maybe down at the other end.”

“Thanks. And I meant no offense about the porn. Just the leather and all those tats, but I’m sure you did what you had to in prison.”

“What?”

They were already trotting down the corridor. Serge grabbed the handle of a massive door. It creaked open. Another conference room, long tables with white linen, metal ice-water carafes dripping condensate. Hundreds of people in leather jackets with affiliate patches taking notes from an overhead projector.

Serge closed the door. They ran to the next room and peeked inside: a potbellied man in a Harley shirt delivering a PowerPoint presentation. Next room, and the next. Just more bikers. Serge’s trot broke into a run. He passed an open door. A large, hair-pulling pile of coin and stamp dealers in the middle of the floor.

Serge finally reached the last door at the end of the hall. Coleman caught up, panting. “Is this where they give us lots of cash?”

“We’ll soon find out.” They went inside a room the size of a small hotel suite. Another reception desk by the door. The man behind it had a fifty-dollar haircut, a stockbroker smile and a resume of rolling back odometers. He looked up from paperwork. Serge grinned. “Can you point me toward the Internet Job Fair?”

The man smiled back. “You’re standing in it.”

Serge looked around. “No, not the sign-up room. The main hall.”

“This is the main hall. Welcome!”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“That’s the beauty of the Internet. It’s all virtual reality: very low brick-and-mortar overhead. Why don’t you start at that table over there and work your way around the room. You’ll have trouble choosing from all the marvelous new careers that await. Seize the day! Opportunity knocks!”

Serge eyed him skeptically, then began making the rounds.

The man at the reception desk filled out forms for the next job fair at the Jensen Beach Econo-Inn. Someone cleared his throat. The man looked up.

Serge leaned in and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I think there’s some kind of problem you need to be aware of.”

“What’s that?”

“These so-called job people? They each want me to give them several thousand dollars.”

“And?”

“All the jobs I’ve ever had, the money comes the other direction.”

The man chuckled and shook his head. “That’s the beauty of the Internet. In this new economy, you control your own destiny. So when you give them start-up money, you’re actually believing in yourself.” The man stood and placed a hand on Serge’s shoulder. “You do believe in yourself, don’t you?”

“But I’m not-“

The man squeezed Serge’s shoulder. “Believe!”

“I believe!”

“You’re believing!”

“Can I get a witness!”

“That’s the spirit! Now get over there and-What are you looking at?”

“The little stand in the corner. Is it what I think?”

“What?”

“Free coffee?”

“Uh, sure. Listen-“

“Don’t move!” Serge ran off.

The man looked questioningly at Coleman, who grinned and took a swig from a brown paper bag. “Know where there’s any weed?”

“What?”

Serge ran back with a tall, white Styrofoam cup. “It’s cold.”

“Been meaning to make a new pot.”

“No, I mean that’s good. I can drink it faster.” Serge chugged half in one long gulp. “And you got the giant twenty-four-ounce cups! Usually when it’s free coffee, they’re these little thimbles.” He took another big chug. “Bullshit on thimbles! I can’t resist free coffee, like when I was at that funeral chapel. I wasn’t really at the chapel, just walking by. The door was open, and so was the casket. People crying. Bunch of folding chairs. Guess it was a viewing. Then I see the big silver coffee urn in back. Next thing I know: ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I say: ‘Drinking free coffee.’ ‘Did you know the deceased?’ ‘Not remotely.’ ‘I want you to leave.’ ‘Right after I get a refill.’ ‘No! Get the fuck out now!’ I said, ‘Have some respect: There’s an old dead guy up there.’ ‘That’s my mother!’ ‘Then you have a refund coming. They did a messed-up job. Of course I didn’t know what she looked like before, so maybe it’s a great job.’ ‘Why you-!’ Then all these guys attacked me. Well, tried to, but they didn’t anticipate my triple-threat martial-arts weapons training. I can handle a folding chair like nunchakus. Except I lost my grip and the thing went flying. I tried to explain that the old woman was already dead so it didn’t matter that the Samsonite hit her in the coffin. Things like that always seem to happen when I drink coffee. It’s weird.” Serge looked toward the corner. “I need more coffee. Wait here …”

The man stared with open mouth.

Serge jogged back and chugged. Then he placed his own hand on the man’s shoulder. “I believe in myself all right! In fact, I believe I have a great new business venture that isn’t represented at your fair!”

No answer.

“Don’t you want to hear it?”

Nothing.

“I track down Internet Job Fair scam artists, break into their bedrooms in the middle of the night and shatter their shins with a pipe wrench. I’ll only require a ten-thousand-dollar investment to join your traveling expo. Exceptional bargain if you believe in yourself. You do believe in yourself?”

The man’s mouth stayed open, but nothing came out.

“If you can’t give me the cash, no problem. I’ll just go to a rival job fair, but then of course I won’t be able to guarantee your safety … Jesus, Coleman, look: He’s white as a sheet. Get him some water!”

The man nervously rustling papers. “I-I-I think I can find something in here that pays from the start.”

“Really?” Serge pulled up a chair. “I’m all ears!”

“Internet map sites.” He handed a clipboard across the table. “Here’s one that’s hiring.”

“Map sites?” asked Serge.

“Yeah,” said Coleman, standing over him with his paper bag. “Like Google Earth. I zoomed in on nude beaches at the library, but the boobs were still fuzzy.”

“Coleman, that’s an aerial image site,” said Serge. “I think he means those mapping services that give wrong directions.”

The man behind the desk nodded. “They need street checkers.”

“What’s that?”

“You drive all day with a GPS-laptop and maps, working your way around the state, going up and down every street to check for accuracy and new highway construction.”

Serge looked up from the clipboard. “But I do that anyway.”

“Gas and two hundred bucks a week.”

“They actually pay?” said Serge. “I had no idea this was going on.”

“Most people don’t. But between the big three map sites, there’s at least a thousand people canvassing the country at any moment.”

Serge killed the rest of his coffee and slammed the cup on the desk. “Two hundred isn’t enough. I’ll take the Internet cheat job instead. Just got my concealed weapons permit. Looks pretty real if you don’t know what the real ones look like … ‘Mr. Saturday Night Special!’ … Sorry, been hung up on Skynyrd since I got to town. Brrrrowwwow-wow-wow-wow-wow! Good coffee! Monday Night Football, blue lightbulbs, brick and mortar, thimbles, pipe wrench. Please proceed …”

A bead of perspiration formed on the man’s left temple and trickled down his cheek. He conducted another rapid search under stacks of paper. “Here’s something else. Hotel evaluator for travel-discount website.”

“Perfect!” said Serge. “Already doing that, too. Got fired from a couple of the big outfits last month, so I had to start my own site for free. Have you seen it? Revolutionary features, like rows of cute little icons to grade hotels on a scale of zero to five. Anything over two-and-a-half cartoon hookers, syringes or Lyme-disease ticks, keep driving … See, Coleman? Told you I knew what I was doing. Now we get to cash in on all that hard work.” He turned back to the man. “How much to buy out my site? Bidding starts at a million.”

“Doesn’t work that way. You’ll need to use new lists of hotels chosen by the website and fill out a special checklist they supply. Pays twenty dollars a property and a free room.”

“Twenty bucks a day!” said Serge. “How are we supposed to live on that?”

“Oh no, you don’t just do the one hotel you’re staying at. Most of the guys hit five or six others during the day, maybe seven if you’re fast. Are you good with time management?”

“You kidding?” said Serge. “I fuck Time’s mother.”

“What?”

“I used to say Time’s wife, but it didn’t sound as good. What do you think?”

The man trembled with paperwork. “So you want the hotel job?”

“And the map thing.”

“Both? But that’s too much for anybody.”

“Not me. Probably even have time left over for the job-fair cheat thing.”

“Let me start filling out these forms for you.”

“I’ll be over at the coffee.”

INTERSTATE 75

An ad-hoc convoy of independent truckers rumbled south

through Georgia. Dixie mudflaps, CB antennas. The lead Kenworth had running lights arranged in a cross on the front grill. Black diesel smoke puffed in military rhythm as the setting sun flickered through distant pines and oak. The Florida state line went under the first tires.

They continued down the highway, passing pockets of chain and off-brand budget motels nestled around each exit. One motel had a tiny discolored swimming pool just over the pushed-down interstate fence, where a theme-park-or-bust Ohio family wrung low-expectation joy from the diving board. Children did cannonballs and splashed and shrieked in high-pitched counterpoint to the background drone of eighteen-wheelers. They used to tap trees for turpentine in these parts.

The Sand Flea Motel was popular among economy tourists who fell for a scam from the newspaper-quality pages of coupon booklets distributed at official state welcome centers. The booklets promised twenty-five percent discounts for a double-bed regular. Then the coupon was presented, and management wagered on parents being too drained to object when informed that all the discount rooms were full-but they still had plenty exactly like them at standard rate.

It was a flat, two-story motel, with faded concrete stairs leading to the balcony and a long steel railing encased by six simultaneously chipping layers of paint. One of the second-floor rooms had its curtains pulled tight. Outside the door were four muscular men with shoulder-length, shampoo-resistant hair. They stood in a line at the railing, like bodyguards on lookout, which they were. Inside the room, a pert young brunette from Macon hopped next to the dresser, wiggling panties off her ankles and flinging them over a lamp with her foot. Across the bed: an already naked man, strapping strong like the others outside, but in a different way. Trim at the waist, then broadening toward the chest and shoulders from the kind of workout regimen that only takes place in lockdown. He couldn’t have been a day over twenty-five, with short, dyed-blond hair, a reddish tan, and a giant dagger tattoo running navel to sternum. The knife’s handle was … well, it was kind of hard to tell. The man had told the tattoo artist to surprise him with something scary, but the artist was ripped on crank and kept messing up. A spitting cobra became a flying lizard, then a gargoyle, then a tarantula-“Wait, I can fix it!”-vampire bat, horned toad, mud dauber wasp, Gila monster-the customer’s face growing increasingly crimson with silent rage-coyote, T. rex, briefly a badger, space robot, Chinese symbol, daisy chain of swastikas, and the head of Mamie Eisenhower, until it was finally one big, irreversible blob. The customer was about to explode … “Hold on, I got an idea!” The tattoo parlor doubled as a screen printing shop, and the artist quickly retrieved a squeeze bottle. He fired up the needle again and incorporated the bottle’s contents into the design. Finally, he was finished and looked up with a smile. “There! How do you like it?”

The young man stared down. “What the fuck is it?”

“A jellyfish. Pretty scary, eh?”

“What’s scary about a jellyfish?”

“Wait…” The artist ran to a wall and turned off the lights. “What the hell did you do to me?”

“I added some of the luminous fluid we use to make glow-in-the-dark T-shirts.”

“Now it’s just a blob that glows.”

“Glowing is scary.”

The artist was paid for his work with a free burial at sea.

That was two years ago, when the “Jellyfish” nickname started. Of course no one ever said it to his face. At least not twice. Instead, he demanded being called the “Eel,” because that’s what he insisted the tattoo looked like. Terrified subordinates studied the unrecognizable, glowing splotch and swore they saw an eel. “It’s fantastic, Eel!” Until his back was turned, then it was the forbidden sobriquet again …

And now the Eel stood in a second-floor budget motel room near the Florida line with a young nymph from Macon. He grabbed a drawstring leather pouch from his suitcase, loosened the neck and dumped the contents on the bed.

The woman gasped. Sheets sparkled with what looked like tiny shards of ice. “Are those real diamonds?”

The man made a silent motion.

The woman climbed into bed. “You don’t talk much, do you?” She leaned back slowly on top of the gems. Some of the larger stones stung slightly. And she liked it.

He turned off the lights.

“Holy shit! What’s that thing on your chest?”

The man pounced. More attack than liaison, headboard pounding so violently that asbestos dust fell from drop-ceiling tiles. The woman shrieked with ankles pinned to her ears. Eyes closed, chin thrust up. “What a turn on! Fuck me on the diamonds! Fuck me on the diamonds! Oh God, I’m going to come so hard! Fuck me on the diamonds! How much do you think they’re worth?”

The answer was stillness. She opened her eyes. All over before the fifty-second mark. At two minutes, the man zipped his jeans.

The woman sat up extra carefully so as not to scatter the gems sticking to her back. “You don’t waste time either.” She reached a hand behind her shoulder blades and slowly brushed them off, making sure they stayed in the middle of the sheet. Then she knelt next to the bed and scooped them into a pile. “We still have a deal, right? I get to keep ‘em?”

The man slipped into a faded Biketoberfest T-shirt.

She shook her head. “Whatever …”-resuming the gathering process-“… feel free to jump into the conversation anytime …”

The man walked to his suitcase.

She grabbed the drawstring pouch off the nightstand and began filling it.

He removed something from his luggage.

She finished and pulled the bag’s string, then reached for her clothes. “Been fun, but I gotta run.”

The man turned to face her.

She dropped the pouch. “What’s that for?”

He stepped forward.

She stepped back. “Stop fooling around. This isn’t funny.”

OceanofPDF.com