Every Last Drop by Charlie Huston
She drops the towel.
—’Cause the memory T count is so high. They keep the cytotoxics from getting out of hand. They, right, they remind them what to attack and what not to attack.
She looks at me in the mirror.
—Until you haven’t fed. Then the memory Ts start to die. Poor little cytotoxic Ts don’t know what to do. They go totally crazy.
She runs water over her hands, washing away the blood from the towel.
—But they all start as little baby stem cells. They all start the same. Nothing but potential.
She turns off the water.
—Like the babies you saw in that nursery.
She blinks.
—I’m not saying they know what they’re doing. But if the guys at the top are saving cord blood for themselves to feed on, it’s probably really, really good. I mean.
She licks her lips, frowns.
—The rich have a habit of saving the best for themselves. I ought to know.
She swallows.
—So if they like it so much, if it makes them feel so good, I mean, maybe it’s the stem cells. All those.
She tries to smile, falls far short.
—All those babies.
She holds up a hand.
—Excuse me.
She throws up in the sink.
I watch as she rinses her mouth and spits it out.
—Sorry. Gross. I guess.
She splashes water in her face, blots with the bottom of her shirt.
—I guess.
She keeps her face covered.
—I guess.
She pulls her face out, smiling sick as she cries.
—I guess I’m not as tough as I think I am.
I take a drink.
—Here.
I offer her the bottle.
—Get tougher.
I stand behind her, looking at one of her monitors.
She taps on her keyboard, tears dried.
—This fair?
I shrug.
—There’s no such thing as fair. But it’s enough.
She hits Enter.
—Need me to write it down?
—I’ll remember.
She looks up at me.
—I mean, how could you forget?
—Yeah. How could I forget.
She looks at her desk, moves a few papers.
—Fuck.
I look at a clock.
—Yeah, fuck.
I go to the chair and pick up my jacket.
—Guess you got some work to do.
She picks up several of the papers, shuffles them, drops them in a shredder, listens to it whine.
—Yeah. I mean, new priorities. I mean, Cure is still about a cure, but.
She looks at the floor, at the people on the floors below it.
—We’ll need to start being a whole lot more selective.
I put on my jacket.
—And you’ll need to buy guns.
She looks at me.
—Yeah. I mean, so many guns.
She comes around the desk and walks with me to the door.
—Thanks for, like, getting Sela out of here before you said anything. You were right about that. She would have freaked out. Sela, she’s, I mean, so moral. Something like this, coming from you, she would have, I mean, she would have needed to blame someone. So. I mean, she totally would have killed you for not trying to save them. Or something. And that would have sucked.
I open the door and go out.
She grabs the tail of my jacket.
—It’s not your fault, Joe. You couldn’t save them by yourself.
I pull loose.
—Never crossed my mind to try.
Figure.
Figure it how you want. Figure it goes back. Way back. Don’t lie to yourself about it. When Menace says, You know where they come from, he’s right. I know where they come from. They come from that hole in the ground. Figure no one needs to stick a needle in their brain to make them dumb and docile. Figure they’ve been bred that way. Born in a hole, live in a hole, bleed in a hole, die in a hole. And when they’re dead, figure their bones ground up with the gravel and mixed into cement.
Look at this city. Look at your city. Look at the sidewalk under your feet. Look at the foundations under the buildings.
You’re walking on their bones. You’re living in their skeletons.
Figure that’s the story.
Figure that’s the whole story and there’s no changing it.
Figure life goes on and doesn’t care.
That’s how I figure it. Out the front door of the Cure house, down the steps and into the car Amanda called and has waiting for me. Staring out the window, not bothering to look for the tail I know is behind me. Looking at the streets where I live. Or do my little imitation of life. I figure it all the way down.
The advantage of one eye?
Brothers and sisters, you just fucking see less of what’s going on.
Enough of a blessing to make a man think about putting out the other one.
I have a phone number.
It belongs to someone whose life I saved once. That might count for something, if she hadn’t saved mine twice.
Borrowing the driver’s cell, I call it. Not sure if I want it to still work. Not sure if I want anything but to be hung up on when my voice is recognized.
It still works.
And I’m not hung up on.
So in the spirit of poking out my remaining eye, I tell a story.
A story told, you can’t untell it. It has to run its course to the end. The story I tell, it ends bloody. Or it will, anyhow.
Like I know any other kind of story.
Car lets me off well below Fourteenth.
Deep in Society turf. Far from the border. Far as possible from the blade that’s coming for my head and all the things it now knows.
Moves to make.
People to see.
Stories to tell.
—’Lo, Joe. Long time no see.
I come up the tenement steps.
—Just saw you earlier tonight, Hurl.
He pushes up the brim of his hat.
—Sure, an’ so it was. Still an all, seems some time ago. Funny dat, ain’t it?
I put my hands in my pockets.
—Well, put it that way, does seem a long time. But I don’t see anything funny in it.
He hooks a thumb in a suspender.
—Well, humor is a funny ting. Ta each his own.
I point at the door behind him.
—Terry in?
—Sure he is.
—Can I see him?
—Sure ya can, Joe. Nobody Terry’d like ta see more den yerself. C’mon in and be at home.
He raps hard on the door and it’s pulled open.
Just inside are three skinny guys in faded fatigue jackets, light bouncing off their shaved heads and the barrels of their shotguns.
I look at Hurley.
—Not the kind of we’re all one greeting I’m used to getting at a Society house.
He nods.
—Well, since dat last time.
He rubs his belly where the machine gun nearly cut him in two that last time.
—Since dat last time, Terry gave me charge of security.
I scratch my cheek.
—Gone back to the old-school ways, have you?
He shakes his head.
—It’s a complicated world, Joe. I spend more of my life confused den clear. But some tings don’t seem ta me ta need changin’. An bein’ smart ’bout who ya let in yer house is one a dem.
I check out the three partisans and their guns.
—They itchy types?
He frowns.
—I’m a professional, Joe. Dese are my boys. Dey know how ta hold dere water and do as dere told.
I hold up a hand.
—Didn’t mean to imply anything different.
He smiles.
—’Course ya didn’t. Ya have some manner
He gives me a shot with his elbow, almost breaking a rib.
—Seein’ as I was. Born inna barn. See.
He guffaws.
I rub my ribs.
—Sure, I see, Hurl. Real rib tickler.
He points at me and roars.
—Rib tickler! I get it, Joe! I get it! You go on in now. He’ll be eager ta see ya, Terry will. Go on in.
I go in, leaving him to chuckle over the comic implications of our witty little exchange.
Hurley. Just when you start thinking he’s maybe not as dumb as mud, he trips you up and sucks your shoe off and leaves you stuck in it.
The partisans eyeball me.
I flick a finger at the door at the end of the hall.
—Shall we?
One of them backs off and lifts his gun and points it at my face.
—Pat-down.
I raise my hands.
—Sure thing.
I turn to face the wall.
—Best make sure I don’t got any nails on me. I go in there with a couple of those, and your boss is gonna be pissed as hell.
—I tell you, Joe, I didn’t expect to see you so, I don’t know, promptly.
I pick at some dry creek-scum on my pants.
—Everyone’s so surprised with me being on time tonight. My reputation must be worse than I thought.
He fiddles his glasses.
—I just thought it might take you a little longer to work something out. Sure, the girl is fond of you and all, but I just thought you’d have to do something more nuanced than to walk in to her and ask for a bunch of money. Relationships, I’ve mostly found, are, I don’t know, bruised by money talk. It’s a shame really, that something as disconnected from real life as money, something that’s just purely this monolithically theoretical concept that we’ve plastered onto life, that something fictional should be able to harsh our personal relationships the way it does.
He lifts his hands in surrender to market forces.
—But there it is. The stuff is everywhere. And people, they’ve, for better or worse, they’ve agreed we need it to get by.
I look at a poster on the wall. The Concert for Bangladesh.
—If it makes you feel any better, I had to use some nuance. Had to finesse it some, working the whole thing out.
He raises his eyebrows.
—I like that idea, I like the idea of you using some finesse. A quality like that, it could make all the difference for a person like you, Joe.
He lowers his eyebrows.
—A shame it, let’s just say it, a shame it’s too late for that kind of thing to change how we interact. Some of our conversations over the years, they would have benefited from a little finesse.
—So you say.
He takes off his glasses, folds and opens the arms a couple times.
—Yeah.
He puts them back on.
—So I say. For what it’s worth, and all.
I point at the glasses.
—Something I wanted to ask.
—Yeah?
—Why do you wear those things?
He purses his lips.
—Um.
I nod.
—Yeah, um. Me, I never wore the things, but still I notice the Vyrus sharpened my eyes. Strange it didn’t fix whatever’s wrong with yours.
He takes them off again, looks at them.
—Yeah, well, yeah, sure. Honestly. These are just, you know, glass. Just. Well I’m not the only one with this, you know.
He puts them on.
—This affectation. I wore them before I was infected. Always felt weird without them. Even though they don’t make me see any, I don’t know, any more clearly.
—Hnuh.
He sits there, looking out from behind his play glasses. I look at the room some more. His little office. A bedroom squirreled away at the back of a tenement. Typical Society digs. Street-salvage furniture, rock and protest posters, books by Noam Chomsky.
Terry pushes a button on the oscillating fan that’s moving the dead air around and it kicks up a gear.
—I try not to use it. The things burden the grid almost as much as an air conditioner. That’s as much for our finances at this point as it is for the environment. So.
He watches me.
I let him.
He shakes his head.
—So, money. Joe.
—Not much finesse in that transition, Terry.
He leans forward, elbows on knees.
—Money. Joe.
I point at a coffee cup filled with pens that sits atop his press-wood desk.
—It’s an account. You’ll want to write down the number and password.
He picks up a pen and a piece of notepaper with a little circle of green arrows on it to let you know that no new trees were killed to make it.
—Shoot.
My hand twitches. But the partisans took my gun.
So instead of putting a bullet in him, I give him the numbers. I tell him how much Amanda put in the account.
He looks at the numbers on the sheet of paper.
—She must really care about you. No joking around, Joe. I may not like the idea of money as an expression of affection, and she may, I don’t know, have it to spare, but this seems like someone trying to make a point about how much they value you. Not that I’m advocating using dollars to put a value on human or any other kind of life.
I wave a hand.
—Like I said, I used some nuance.
He looks at me over the lenses of those glasses that don’t let him see any better.
—Tell you, man, I’d sure like to know what that was like.
—Well, Terry, seeing as this money is supposed to put me back on the map down here. Get me a place out of the way, some kind of privileges if I want to move around a little.
He nods.
—Sure, man, that was the deal.
I stand.
—Well seeing as that’s the deal, and seeing as we’re maybe on the way back to being on something like friendly terms, why don’t I tell you what it was like.
He sets the paper and pen aside.
—Something on your mind, Joe?
I shake my head.
—Just like I said, just want to explain what it was like. Working some nuance for the girl.
I look at the floor between my feet, a long gash in the wood where something heavy was once dragged over it.
—What it was like was, it was like going down a hole and finding dozens of stupid, mute, starving kids with hoses stuck in their arms to make it easy to get their blood out. It was like going down that hole, and looking down it, and seeing a string of red lights, going deep, lights letting you know that there were hundreds more of them down there. And I’m wondering.
I look at him.
—That sound like something you might have seen at one time or another, Terry?
He takes off the glasses, looks at them, puts them aside.
—Yes.
He rubs his eyes.
—Yes it does.
I nod.
—Man. Were you smart.
He looks at me.
—How’s that?
—Having your boys take my gun before I came in here. That just saved your life.
—It’s interesting. In a way. Being able to talk about it. The terrible thing about a secret, it’s that, I don’t know, that pressure it creates. Right? That internal variance. Like with laws of diffusion, how a liquid or a gas is always seeking to spread itself evenly through a medium, yeah? So you exhale smoke, which I still wish you wouldn’t do in here by the way, but you exhale, and rather than it doing what I wish it would do and just kind of cling to you, it gradually spreads, diffuses into the air. And like, I’ve thought this before, how a secret is kind of the same. It wants to, this is pretty spacey, one of my spacey ideas, but how it wants to spread itself. Like smoke. Diffuse into the atmosphere until
He keeps rubbing his forehead, pressing his fingertips deep into his temples, eyes closed.
—But not all at once. Not like, you know, like when something is under extreme pressure and you release it, it just, man, it explodes out. Yeah? People get hurt. And, our life here, our life with the Vyrus, that’s not like can-of-soda pressure. You release this truth you don’t get some mess sprayed on the wall. The Vyrus, that’s bomb pressure. That’s, and I don’t think this is hyperbole, but that’s nuclear-device pressure. That’s an explosion that rocks the world to its foundation. And.
He stops rubbing, rests his head in his hand, eyes still closed.
—And this, this secret we’re talking about. That, that instillation in Queens, that’s pressure on a whole different order. That’s like, like, if the Vyrus is a nuke, that place is like a doomsday device.
He opens his eyes.
—That place, Joe.
He lifts his head, looks at me.
—That place is like a bomb that kills us all.
He points east, without looking there.
—People know about that, and there is nothing, nothing short of, man, nothing short of Jesus-Mohammed-Buddha-Gaia-Jehovah itself that saves us.
He wipes his mouth.
—So, to talk about it, man, something that exerts that kind of pressure, to talk about it for the first time in decades, that’s just blowing my mind here. That’s, the whole thing, it’s like a mirror being held up, when you take something like that out of the box and look at it after so long. It’s a, man, it’s trip and a half.
He stares at his trembling hand.
—A trip and a half.
He moves his hand, reaches for his prop glasses, slips them on.
—But a thing like that, it belongs in its box.
I study that gash in the floor a little more.
—Well, I know you’re no fool, Terry. Me the jury’s still out on. Even so, I think I read this one pretty clear.