“One zero aught naught hours on a Saturday morning, which means you’re on with Billy Breaks, your host who’s the toast of the coast on KOCC, ninety point five on your FM dial, listener-supported community radio, and we’re starting off the day with a genuine three-minute barn-burning banger, guaranteed, it’s Le Sserafim, which is supposed to be in all-caps, so let’s say you heard it that way, Le Sserafim, I’m fearless, with, it’s also in all-caps, so say it loud, Unforgiven!” Flick of a switch, punching a button that lights up white, he lifts off his headphones releasing a swelling whine from the cans that’s suddenly bent around the sneering licks of a Western-tinged guitar, unforgiven, I’m a villain, I’m a unforgiven, he hangs them from a hook on the front of the board before him. That plaid shirt of his hung open over a black T-shirt that says the Magnus Archives, rounded by the pot of his belly. A red light’s blinking, up at the top of the board, he sees it, and turns about in his chair to face the equipment across from the turntables, but hesitates, a moment, before hauling up a dull green Bakelite handset, and again, a hesitation, before he says, “Hello?”
And then, “Is it you?” Leaned forward, elbow on the board, handset against his ear. “It is you, isn’t it.”
And then, “You got the box,” he says. “I didn’t,” but then he takes in a deep breath, blows it out, a sigh, “you,” he says, “you want to talk. You call, you must want to talk. If you just, wanted to hear me say something, talk, I mean, all you’d have to do is turn on the radio. So. What is it? What’s up? How have you,” but he lifts the handset from his ear, looks at it in his hand. Drops it with a rattle back in its cradle. He snags the headphones from the hook, that sneering, bouncing guitar, presses a can to his ear, listening for a moment, looking to the turntables, the middle one, the disk unmoving on the platter, the angle of the tonearm, the needle set and waiting in a groove, his other hand now hovering over a switch there, waiting, waiting.
The key’s attached by a paperclip to a softly worn circular tag, numerals scrawled in ink paled almost to illegibility, 479, the 7 marked with a bar across the upright, tag bouncing as she jiggles her hand, looking over the paneled blue overhead doors set in the white wall to her right, numerals etched in the lintels above them, but not in any apparent order, 451, 455, 427. An exasperated grunt. Her saggy, short-sleeved shirt a brownish beige, the collar and placket of a darker chocolate, but the front’s streaked and smeared with filth almost black in the flat white light.
“You have any idea where you’re going?” he says, his lightly loose shirt of bright pink gingham mostly unbuttoned, blond hair unruly, cheeks indifferently stubbled. “Four seventy-nine,” she says, curtly clipped.
“Yeah, well,” looking about, the blue doors, the numerals, “well, shit,” he says.
“There it is,” pointing with that key in her fist, the next building down. “I think.”
The padlock takes some convincing. “Hey, I could,” he says, “let me try,” but she ignores him, bracing a black Chuck against the white jamb for one last straining grimacing tug. The shackle pops open, “shit,” she says, shaking out her hand, then yanks the lock off the hasp, leans down to grip the blue handle at the bottom of the door, hauls it clanking up. The unit within’s not deep, but still the daylight can’t quite reach the back of it, cardboard boxes in shadowy stacks four and five high along the three walls about a half-dozen more or so piled on the floor before them, and an enormously decrepit wicker wheelchair, “What the hell?” he says.
“She lives in a fucking motel room,” says Jo, stepping over a box, around a softly oblong ridge of some beanbag cushion. “Where’s she supposed to put her stuff.”
“Got any idea where it is?” he says, a hand up to shade his eyes.
“I’m finding a shirt, first,” she says, fetched up against a rolling rack of clothing hung from wire hangers, “get this shit off me.”
“Sorry,” he says, “about that. McGee, he’s, ah,” looking away as she lifts her shirt up over her head and off, distastefully wadding it into a ball, tossing it away. “Enthusiastic,” he says.
“That’s a word for it,” she says, muscles working in her bare back as she works her way through the hung clothing, jackets, skirts, bundles still anonymously swaddled in dry-cleaner plastic, “you want to help, Scottie?” she says, pulling a small dark blouse off the rack, “maybe look for something that says Birth Certificate on the side, I dunno.”
The box clanks as she pulls the weight of it down, and she pries open the flaps to reveal dozens of paper-wrapped bundles, flat disks of plates, or pot lids, maybe, rough cylinders of glassware, other, more abstruse shapes, she folds up the flaps again, dressed now in a print blouse of oversized flowers against a dark background, the top couple buttons of it only done up, and shoves the box aside. Reaches for the next, braced for another weight, but staggers back with the unexpected lightness of it, crackle of wicker and squeak of rubber as she nearly falls into the wheelchair, “shit.”
“You okay?”
She wrenches open the flaps to reveal a single pillow, sham of it yellowed with old grease. “Jesus.”
“Well,” he says, “this one has paperwork, so that’s, maybe, promising?” Stirring through the slips of paper loose at the top of the box before him. “Bunch of, canceled checks. Who the hell writes checks anymore? Like, actually writing. On paper. Hey,” he says, holding one up, frowning. “You’re rich.”
“What?” she says, pushing the wheelchair out of her way. “Fuck’re you talking about.”
“Ten thousand dollars,” he says, holding out the slip. “Juliet Maguire. October one, what is that, six years ago. Ten thousand dollars.” She snatches it, peers at it, turns it about, holds it up against the light. “The fuck,” she says.
“That’s you, right?” he says. “Juliet.”
“Jo,” she says. “Not Jules. Not Julie. Jo.”
“Jo isn’t short for Juliet, though,” he says.
“No,” she says. “It isn’t.” That slip of paper an oblong, a bit more than twice as wide as it is high, printed with a washed-out image of cartoon princesses pressed together for a group-hug selfie, Gwendolyn R. Morris printed in one corner, a sharply cursive font, 736 North Coast Highway, Pay to the Order Of, and in an assertively unremarkable hand, JULIET K. MAGUIRE, and TEN THOUSAND + 00/100.
“There’s another,” he says, “the year before. And two years before that, and another one, it’s, ah,” and “Stop,” she says.
“All for the same amount,” he says. “Ten thousand a pop. So you’re, what, Josephine? You have a sister?”
“No,” says Jo. She slips the check back into the box before him with the rest. “Forget about it. Let’s, ah, what time is it.”
“Just about three.”
“Shit,” says Jo. “No, just, forget it.” She folds up the flaps and shoves the box onto the stack before her, steps back, head bowed, hands up, heels of them pressed against rubbing her eyes, a breath sucked in, blown out. Lowers her hands, lifts up her head, face blankly serene. “Do me one more favor.”
“Just the one?” he says. “That’s it? You promise?”
“Swing us by the liquor store, before you drop me off at the Embarcadero.” Tugging that blouse about herself to do up another button, and another. “If I’m counting right,” he says, “that’s two.”
“I’ll walk home from there. It’s, ah,” she says, “there’s a party.”
“A party?” he says. “I got time.”
“Trust me,” she says. “You wouldn’t want to go.”
Night, and a long and terribly regular concrete slope, steeply straight-edged unlit grey against lightless black above, a bunker wall, a dry canal, he’s leaned back against it, greatcoat a shadow on that grey, wide-brimmed slouch a darkness hiding his face, turning to look the one way, the other, up and down the length of that blank slant of wall. He shifts, knees bending, lowering himself slowly down the slant until there’s a whir and a click in the darkness ahead and he freezes, tilt of his hat fixed on the source of that sound. Silence, and darkness, stillness until he shifts again, lower and slowly lower until he can reach for the crease where slant meets concrete apron and scoop up a couple-four rocks and a pebble in his hand. Knees unbending, pushing slowly back up the slant until, again, the whir, the click. Braced against the slope, he so slowly lifts one of the rocks from his one hand with the other, a breath.
His arm whips, rock flung skittering click-clack away along concrete. A brilliant bar of white-hot light spears from the darkness ahead, a belling chord that swallows the silence and spits it out in hissing crackling aftermath. That hat dips, a briefly resolute nod, his hands coming slowly, carefully together again. Another breath.
One arm flung out the other direction, a couple more rocks clacking away and another bar of light, another overwhelming chord, but his other arm’s cocked and whipped, and another rock sent zinging toward that incandescent pop ahead even as he drops to the apron, hunched under the white-hot splotch that splashes the concrete above him, and a shower of sparks like dripping stars. A click out there, a whir, a click, and silence once more falls with the darkness. Still crouched, he opens his hands. One lone pebble left, there, in his palm. That hat turns to look the one way, the other, the straightly straitened seam between slope and apron troubled only there, and there, with sparse clumps of struggling grass, a couple-few more rocks, none in reach. A breath, and slowly he lifts a hand to his hat’s wide brim.
That hat skims ungainly away and the whir, the click, the bar of light, the blast of sound, he’s popped up hatless arm cocked and whipped, pebble flying straight and true, a clink out there in the darkness, a keening crack that ends in a pop of sparks, and a whirring whine spins down from some inaudible speed to a cavernous rumbling thumping groan that falls, out of rhythm, dying in a fluttering whine. He’s stepped out, away from the slope, he throws his arms wide, spins about head down, greatcoat a-flap, a toe-drag flourish and a brief little bow, but his congratulatory dance is obscured of a sudden by a swirling red trail that washes in and over below him, diaphanous sheets like gauze, up to his knees like diluted liquid, and the bust of a woman appears to one side of it, dark hair, leather jacket, collar popped, letters appearing beside her in a stylishly fuzzy sans-serif, Lost Girl, they say, and then, crisper, smaller, brighter, Mondays at 10 PM.
“Oh, God, I hate those things. Interstitials, or whatever.”
“Limitations of the source, I’m afraid. I think a couple of these still have full commercial breaks.”
“It’s a historical record, now!”
“Commercials, are one thing? But these, these are, they’re in the way! Distracting, interrupting, obnoxious – ”
“So is complaining about them?”
Dr. Europa, wrapped in his greatcoat, hatless, up on a ladder leaned against a wall, closer to the ceiling than the floor of a vast room lit only by the sharp white edges of chips, thousands upon thousands of them inserted in slots that line the walls and the faces and sides of the cabinets in rows along the floor, and each of those chips a glass plate maybe the width of a thumb, as high as the span of a hand, and each and every one of them marked with strips of black tape, letters and numerals punched out in white, UXO1U, EZGBT, 234FB, SWHHH on the spine of the one he’s gripped between fingers and thumb, he yanks, a clunk as it darkens and pops loose, he draws it out, the length of it perhaps a bit less than a forearm, shimmering in the light of all those others about, and he drops it, smash to the floor below, in the litter of shards of other such dropped and broken chips.
You ought not to be doing this, says a blandly pleasant voice.
He’s reached out, grabbed another, yanked it extravagantly loose, he tosses it over his shoulder, crack. Leans over stretching to grab one several rows down, just about out of reach, yank and toss with a twirl, crash.
You seek the chip that contains my operating system, says the voice. You wish to remove it, and thereby shut me down, to prevent me from completing the Baron’s directive, but you do not know which of these six million, eight hundred and fifteen thousand, seven hundred and forty-four chips is the one you seek. Random pillaging will almost certainly require more time than you have left to find it, and will, as you continue, do immeasurable damage to this compendium of human culture and knowledge the Baron has entrusted to my data banks. The chip you just dropped, for instance, contained the collected works of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Dekker, Sir Thomas North, and Robert Greene. The one you’ve just selected, there, contains the complete filmography of Cheng Bugao. These works will now be lost forever once the Baron’s directive is complete. Shouldn’t you take more care with all that will ever be left of your knowledge, your art, and your accomplishments?
Dr. Europa steps his feet off the rung to slide down the ladder, crackle and pop of glass underfoot. Not twenty-four hours ago, he says, and shoves the ladder on its railing away down the length of the light-studded wall, Special Agent Wynona Shaw, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he leans down to snag one of the lower chips, yanks it loose, sends it whirling away to smash against the corner of a cabinet. She took my hand, he says. She looked me in the eye. She told me to be careful. That’s all she said. But that one exchange, those two words, had such a profound effect on me. They couldn’t help but have an impact on every interaction I’ve had since. Including with you. He shoves the ladder again, yanking as he follows one chip after another from the cabinet beside him, a carillon of breaking glass. There are six billion people out there in the world, he says, suddenly heated, and every single one of them has given, and received, countless moments, just like that, and not a one of those can be found anywhere in your, looking about, data banks. I’ll grind every goddamn chip into dust if there’s the slightest chance of saving them!
You do not have the slightest chance, says the voice, unperturbed. Less than ten minutes remain before the directive is complete.
Dr. Europa’s stopped, there by an aisle between rows of cabinets, stretched across the vast room to the opposite wall, the chips become a ghostly blur of light with the distance. He sets off toward it.
Redoubling your destructive efforts in another part of the facility will do you no good, says the voice. If you were to assume it takes two seconds to remove and destroy each chip, and you were to work tirelessly, without a break for food or water or sleep, it would take you one hundred fifty-seven days, eighteen hours, thirty minutes, and forty-eight seconds to grind every one of them to dust, as you put it. There are but eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds left to you.
I don’t have to break every one of them, says Dr. Europa. Just the right one. The one that contains your operating system. The Baron would’ve had to remove it, to test it, alter it, and put it back, more than once. It’s a, a material thing, a mechanical thing. There’s wear, and tear. Maybe a little dust gets in. Maybe a connection’s loosened, just a tad. Maybe the light’s a little dimmer, than all the others around it. He’s reached that other wall, lifted an arm, he’s sweeping his hand along the rows of chips there at eye level, slowing, settling, pointing to one of the chips that’s maybe just barely perceptibly not quite as bright as the others. Maybe the label’s a little worn with handling, he says, stepping close to it. The characters pressed in the tape on the spine say $!YFX, and though the white distress of them isn’t any more faded or worn than the rest of them about, a corner of the label there’s peeled up and back, loosened from the glass.
Traditionally, says Dr. Europa, I should wait until there’s two seconds left on the clock, but you know what? I’m tired.
He yanks out the chip, and the room goes dark.
“Jo?”
“What? Yeah. Sorry.”
“It’s pretty hokey, now. All that anti-nuclear shit.”
“I mean, the end of the world is the end of the world.”
Another vast room, corners and walls lost in shadow, ceiling somewhere too far above. Lights from somewhere harshly illuminate a geometrically perfect circle in the middle of it all, there beneath an enormously gravid cylinder hung from rafters unknowably high, the one end up there a spread of monstrously stubby fins, the other tapered in a sudden conical squash, a serenely bulbous tip only a dozen or so impossible feet above that spotlit circle, and the man sat directly beneath in an aluminum folding chair, hugely fat, blousy shorts and a mesh vest, his splayed feet and the boles of his legs, his ponderous arms and expansive belly, his wide bald head all bare and darkly shining with perspiration. He lifts a tall glass festooned with fruit and a paper umbrella and a long pink straw for a gurgling sip. Baron Kronos, says Dr. Europa, approaching the edge of that light.
There he is! calls the man in the chair, his voice deeply rich. He looks up to that tremendous bomb so weightily hung above them, and sighs. Theatrical, I know, he says. But we are creatures of theatre, you and I.
Your contingency plan, says Dr. Europa.
You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here! The Baron takes one last rattling sip from the straw, then sets the glass down on the concrete as he hoists his other hand, fingers clamped about something, a glimpse of some kludged device, sharply shining metal, flap of loose black tape. Shall we? he says.
Why? says Dr. Europa.
Why? cries the Baron, affronted. Why not! All I need do is open my hand. The bomb falls. Simple as that. Don’t you want to see what happens next?
Next? cries Dr. Europa, stepped fully into the light. Nothing! Nothing happens next! We’ve seen your plans! We’ve checked your math! You will destroy the world!
A dismissive puff of breath from the Baron’s lips. Please, he says. A world’s a far too large and unruly thing ever to be completely destroyed. Something will remain! Something will rise, and rise again, and again and again and again. Haven’t we done enough? Isn’t it time we got out of the way?
Why can’t it come from us? Why can’t it be what we are becoming?
Oh, Simon, says the Baron, but then a shiver thrills through him, his knees and bare feet tremble, shift, his shoulders lift from the back of the chair as it creaks beneath him, his big head shakes as he takes in a slurp of air, and settles himself, forgive me, he says. The immense, and he frowns, looking for a word, the immensity, he says, of this moment, that’s finally upon us. Delicious, isn’t it.
Please, says Dr. Europa.
Is that to be your last word? Please? The Baron smiles. Have you given any thought to your last words? I know I have. Shall I give you a moment to consider? I am, after all, a generous man. I could spare a moment, for you, old friend.
Peter, please, says Dr. Europa. You do not have to do this. You have shown it can be done, that has to be enough. Dismantle the bomb, and let the world go on. Please. His affect flat, his words almost a toneless mutter, he wavers, his shoulders, his head, his torso over his planted feet, with exhaustion, or some other overwhelming thing. I’m begging you, he says.
The Baron leans forward, elbows on his knees, bracing that hand held up still clamped about the device. Hurry up, please, he says, with a faintly mocking lilt. It’s time.
He opens up his hand.
The device pops free, drops, and Dr. Europa drops with it, felled to his knees, slumping at the click-clack of the device, bounced to a stop on the concrete before him. He opens his eyes, his breath coming too quickly, and too shallow. A worn red plastic handle, pulled from some handlebar, a bicycle, a rototiller, and fastened to it by round after round of soft black tape a spring-loaded clip, now popped out, and nothing more, no wires, no chips, no plugs or batteries. He reaches for it with a shaking hand, but the Baron lurches upright on his big bare feet, Remember this! he bellows. Remember this feeling. Its profound effect. Remember what you would have done for them. After all, he says, you and I? We, are creatures of theatre.
The pad of his feet as he walks away, leaving Dr. Europa alone, on his knees, in the light beneath that enormous bomb.
“Such a fucking cop-out,” says Thad, at the one end of the couch, arm stretched along the back of it. “Oh, it wasn’t real. Oh, there never really was a bomb. Geeze.”
“Pretty affecting, for a cop-out,” says Bex, at the other end. She’s got the enormous remote, but isn’t doing anything with it.
“I think there was a bomb,” says Kirsten, in the one armchair. “I mean, he did build a bomb, there was, all the stuff, the clues to follow, but, I mean, Dr. Europa was right. Shutting off Adam-One did the trick, and the Baron was just lying about the trigger, at the end.”
“That bomb, Kristen?” says Thad, and Jo looks up at that. “The stupid Wile E. Coyote looking thing they hung from the ceiling? That was just a prop! Set dressing! Sure as shit wasn’t any kind of anything that could blow up the world.”
“Of course it was a prop!” says Kristen. “They couldn’t have a real bomb.”
“I mean in the story it was a prop. That the Baron built. To fuck with Europa.”
“But the story doesn’t work, if it wasn’t real!”
“I know!”
Amy there in the middle of the couch leans forward, looking over to Jo on the floor there, sat by the ottoman, “Hey,” she says. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” says Jo, “sorry,” without looking away from the screen, once more a wall of monospaced, monochrome text. “It just, it really creeped me out, the first time I saw it. And I, I hadn’t seen it since.”
“When did we see that one?” says Kristen. “It was, it was – sixth grade! Because you would not shut up about it for weeks after.”
“We had, I think, one conversation about that episode,” says Jo.
“Which was, like, three weeks later!” says Kristen. “It was when Syfy did a marathon, only my dad was out of town, so we were at your dad’s because he had cable. Wow,” she says, leaning back, looking thoughtful, “remember when you had to have cable?”
“It’s just, so, lonely?” Jo’s saying. “Everybody else, one after another, they have to get left behind, and it’s just him and the Baron at the end, like the world was already done for, you know? Only,” but here, she hesitates a moment, and then, “the way I remember it, he was all in white.”
“Give me the remote,” Thad’s saying, to Bex, and “No,” she says, and then, “wait, what?”
“I know what to watch next,” says Thad, wriggling the fingers of his outstretched hand.
“His, his outfit,” says Jo, “the suit, the coat, the cut and shape and all was the same, but it was all in white,” there’s a knock at the door over there, “white against all that darkness inside the computer, but it wasn’t explained, or mentioned, or anything. Weird.”
“Well,” says Thad, “that would be because,” but Bex is saying “Make yourself useful, get the door?”
“It’s probably the pizza,” says Thad. “Finally.”
“Nobody’s called up,” says Kristen.
“Maybe somebody else buzzed ’em in,” says Thad. “We’re hardly the only people to order pizza on a Saturday.”
“Well, go, see,” says Bex, but he’s already drawn back his hand, he’s getting to his feet, “I mean,” he says, “it’s because they didn’t, because it never happened,” headed away out from under the skylight toward the apartment door.
“I know,” Jo’s saying, “we just, watched it. It’s only, the memory. It’s so clear, even though it obviously,” a gesture, at the screen, “didn’t happen like that.”
“Maybe he was wearing white?” says Amy. “Your dad? Like, a white shirt? Or something? And it got confused? Your memory?” Bex snorts. “What?” says Amy, but then, “Jo?” Thad’s calling, from there by the opened apartment door, and Jo sits up. “He says he’s here for you?” says Thad.
There in that doorway, brown bomber jacket, hair a matted pompadour, goggles glinting up on his forehead, Sweetloaf, and in his hands an envelope.
“UNFORGIVEN,” written by SCORE (13), Megatone (13), Supreme Boi, Pontus Petersson, Josefin Glenmark, Anders Gukko, Anne Judith Wik, Nermin Harambašić, BENJMN, Feli Ferraro, Kris Jana, Kyler Niko, Young Chance, Gizzle, MK xyz, Believve & BELLE (KISS OF LIFE), © 2023. Lost Girl, created by Michelle Lovretta, ©2015.
