Afterparty (7 page)

A car horn blared, and Hootan jerked the car to the right. The side of a bus like a silver wall appeared six inches from my face, then swept past.

“Jesus Christ!” I yelled. “Are you blinking while driving? Take off those damn specs!”

Hootan said something in an unknown language that I translated as “Fuck you.” The sunglasses stayed on.

Luke said, “So now it’s morning, and the old woman is making noises like she has to go to the bathroom. Francine’s stuck in the house, and the asshole grandson is out there smoking. She thinks, this isn’t even my relative. I am not responsible for this person. So she leaves another message on the boyfriend’s phone and says, ‘Fuck you, I’m out of here.’ And she leaves.”

Hootan said, “She did what?”

“She grabbed her stuff and went back to her friends on the street,” Luke said. “And a couple days later she hears that the boyfriend got admitted to the hospital. He’d been there for days, an overdose maybe or some bad reaction.”

Hootan said, “What happened to the grandmother?”

Luke didn’t answer.

“She just
left
her here?” Hootan said. “She left an old woman to choke and die?”

“That’s what she told me,” Luke said.

“Well, your friend deserved to die.”

“
What?
” Luke said. “Fuck you!”

Hootan slammed on the brakes. Behind us tires squealed, horns blared. He yanked off his glasses. “Say that to me again! Say ‘fuck you’ to me!”

“Shut the fuck up!”

Hootan lurched sideways, trying to get his arm behind him.

“Gun!” Dr. Gloria said.

Hootan’s arm came up with a fat black pistol. He pointed it at Luke’s head.

“Whoa whoa whoa!” I yelled. Not very helpfully.

“Your friend is evil,” Hootan said. “Say it. She is evil and deserved to die.”

Luke had pressed himself back against the passenger door, palms raised, but he didn’t seem as scared as I would be with a gun to my face. “Yes, she
did
evil,” the boy said. “But she isn’t—she’s not
Sauron
. She just made a bad decision.”

“Hootan, you can’t shoot him here,” I said. “You’ll get blood all over the car.”

“Yes, she deserved to die,” Luke said. “We
all
deserve to die. But God forgives.” He looked at me. “God didn’t abandon her. If she felt like He was gone, it’s because she turned away from
Him
.”

“Can we just get to the church?” I asked. “Fayza’s waiting for us to get back.”

Hootan said something in that unknown language. Then he slipped the gun into the front pouch of his sweatshirt. “God is not as forgiving as you think,” he said.

*   *   *

Pastor Rudy’s church was a former auto parts store, the plastic sign above the entrance long gone but the ghost letters still on duty, false shadows on the faded aluminum, their empty screw mounts bleeding rust. In the parking lot a few old vehicles hunkered before the nail salon, the only store in the strip mall that seemed to be open.

Luke unfolded from Hootan’s car and loped toward the church, eager as a puppy, which only annoyed Hootan more. The front door chimed as he pushed it open.

The interior was a wide-open space furnished in early AA Meeting: metal folding chairs, a coffee station, earnestness. Along the walls were long tables that held what looked like elementary school art displays.

Luke said, “Oh, let me show you mine!”

He hurried toward one of the tables. “All of us approach God from different angles. We also see a little piece of the whole. But the piece, the shard, is the same as all of God, right?”

“Hologram,” I said.

“Right! Pastor Rudy had this idea to get us all to share what we were seeing.” Luke proudly showed me a cardboard box. The side facing us was open. On top was a smaller box wrapped in tin foil. The walls inside were bright red and gold, Bollywood colors. A six-inch action figure lay facedown on the floor of the box beneath a much larger yellow umbrella. The edges of the umbrella were singed black.

“Wow,” I said. “You made this yourself?”

The boy was immune to sarcasm. “That’s me,” he said, pointing to the figure. “I can’t see God directly, because I’m facing the wrong way, toward Earth. But He’s there, protecting me. Look.” He reached behind the box, flicked a switch. Inside the tin foil box a light came on, making the umbrella glow.

Dr. G said, “His God is an umbrella.”

“Better than a wet blanket,” I said aloud.

She walked away from me, flexing her wings. “Here’s the guy,” she said.

A figure had stepped out of the back, where the storeroom used to be. My first impression was of an Olympic mid-weight wrestler: bullet head, powerful arms that wouldn’t hang straight, and a posture that suggested a readiness to shoot the legs. He wore a T-shirt with an unreadable logo, old jeans, brown-and-orange CAT work boots. His skin tone fell in the Mediterranean end of the spectrum.

“Luke. Good to see you,” he said. His accent was Mexican. “And your friends.” He held out his hand to me, and I noticed a black tattoo lurking under the lip of his sleeve. “I’m Rudy.” I shook hands. Hootan didn’t lift his hand, but conspicuously put it into the front pouch of his sweatshirt.

Rudy smiled curiously. If he was nervous, I couldn’t see it.

I said, “Luke’s been telling us about your church, how much it changed his life. We also hunger and thirst after righteousness.” I didn’t bother to sound sincere.

He looked at Hootan, then back to me. A tilt of the head that said he didn’t know what was going on but was willing to play along. I saw another tattoo on his neck: the number “13” in Gothic script. He said, “You must have a lot of questions.”

Oh did I. What was going on in the pastor’s head right now? Was he taking his own juice, or only passing it on? It was impossible to tell. He seemed as laid back as a Buddhist monk, but that could have been an act, or his natural chemistry. Behind him, Dr. G drifted along the perimeter of the room, taking in the mini-shrines. I got an impression of Aztec gods, clouds of cotton swabs, black-and-white photo collages. It was an Anti-Science Fair.

Pastor Rudy said, “Do you come from a Christian background, or…” He nodded to Hootan. “Muslim, maybe?”

Hootan said, “We’re here for the drug you gave Luke.” Across the room, Dr. G laughed. So much for playing along. Perhaps Hootan was incapable of ironic banter.

Pastor Rudy frowned in confusion, or at least an impersonation of it. “I’m not sure what he told you, but—”

“I told them, there’s no drug.” Luke said.

Dr. Gloria had reached the doorway at the back of the room. She glanced in, then nodded to me.

“You mind if I look around?” I asked.

Pastor Rudy glanced at Hootan. The kid kept his hand in his front pocket, calling attention to a Bulge of Significance. “I can give you a tour,” the pastor said.

“Nah, that’s okay,” I said. “Why don’t you just take a seat out here? That okay with you, Hootan?”

I didn’t wait for an answer and walked toward the back doorway that Rudy had stepped out from. Dr. Gloria waited there, wings half-unfurled. The doorway opened to a large space that used to be the store’s warehouse. Heavy steel shelving units sat empty except for a few cardboard boxes, a selection of power tools, and building materials: plywood, paint cans, stacks of drywall. Two big doors at the back of the space looked like they led to a loading dock. There were two other smaller doors along a side wall.

“Where do you want to start searching?” Dr. G asked.

“We could split up,” I said.

“Very funny.” She flipped an imaginary gold coin and caught it in her palm. “Heads, that’s the warehouse.”

“I’m checking the side rooms,” I said.

Dr. G sighed. “You don’t have to keep proving you have free will.”

One of the small doors opened to an office. The room was empty except for a metal desk and filing cabinet, a futon covered by a bedsheet, a couple folding chairs like those in the front room. Bars guarded the single window. No other exits.

On the walls hung three brightly colored posters under Plexiglas. They looked like extreme close-ups of plants, or machinery: gleaming tubes that could have been roots; wet silvery blobs like mercurial seed pods; broad swathes of orange and red and yellow that suggested the skin of tropical flowers. Where was the “Footprints in the Sand” poster? Hell, even a crucifix?

The only liturgical supplies were crowded together on top of the filing cabinet: a pair of wooden offering plates; a box of white communion wafers; a two-liter bottle of chianti, half gone; and a sleeve of plastic shot cups. I opened the wafer box, crushed one of the squares, and sniffed. Nothing. I popped another of the wafers into my mouth.

“You don’t know what’s in that,” Dr. G said.

“The body of Christ,” I said. “As dry as ever.” I didn’t detect a psychotropic hit. I unscrewed the wine bottle and inhaled. It smelled like … cheap wine. I thought about taking a swig, but I knew where that would lead, and did I really want to end my sobriety (and it would end, it always ended) on Costco Kool-Aid?

On the desk lay a ten-inch tablet and a separate keyboard. I swiped the tablet’s screen, and it opened to a music player, the cursor paused a couple minutes into something called “Gary Gygax Attax.”

“Smell that?” Dr. G asked.

I looked up. Caught a faint tang of ammonia, and then it was gone. “Someone’s been printing,” I said.

I began opening desk drawers. One was locked, but it was too narrow to hold what I was looking for. I went through each drawer of the filing cabinet, looking for stacks of rice paper, or at least printing supplies. I found nothing but ordinary paper, file folders, tangled computer cables.

Hootan yelled from the front room, “What’s taking so long?”

“Shut up,” I yelled back.

I walked out of the office. Caught another whiff of amines. I started for the warehouse, then stopped, turned toward the other small door. It was unlocked. I pushed it open and flipped on the light, expecting a scattering of cockroaches. It was a bathroom, newly renovated and sparkling clean: white tile, new toilet, a shower stall guarded by a white rubber curtain. I pulled back the curtain.

“Here we go,” Dr. G said, excited.

A new-looking chemjet printer sat on a wire crate positioned in the center of the shower stall. The printer’s exhaust fan and runoff port had been covered by an elegant filter and valve system. Plastic tubes snaked down into the shower drain. In the corner of the stall was an open FedEx box agleam with foil c-packs. Many of them were labeled with the hexagonal sperm symbol of phenethylamine, the yeast of artisanal drug manufacturing.

The chemjet wasn’t a model I recognized. Most of these machines were made in China or Malaysia and stamped with generic-sounding names like “Print Pro,” but this one had no markings that I could see. And those valves were a cut above the usual hobbyist price point.

The printer wasn’t turned on, so I thought it safe to pop the lid. It was like opening the hood of a Chrysler K-car and discovering a Ferrari engine. No, an art project. I recognized many of the components—copper tubes, mini-ovens (each costing thousands of dollars apiece), ceramic refrigeration coils, glass reaction chambers—but others were a mystery to me. Tubes and wires crossed and recrossed in a web that reminded me of neurons, or those graphs showing every possible relation in a social network.

This was like no chemjet I’d ever seen. A normal printer was designed to cook multiple recipes within a certain range, like a home bread maker. No reaction chamber connected directly to another, because you might have to plug in other steps—for drying, mixing, or distilling—to make whatever drug you programmed.

But this engine was so convoluted, so complicated, I knew I didn’t have the skills to take it apart and put it back together to see how it worked. The best I could hope for was a kind of brain scan: watch it in action and try to figure out what was happening.

“Why does this look familiar?” Dr. G asked.

“No idea,” I said. “But this thing makes Numinous, I’m sure of it. We have to take it with us.”

“We can’t just walk out with it,” Dr. G said. “Fayza would never let us keep it.”

The angel had a point. I snapped the lid back in place and closed the rubber curtain. I walked out of the bathroom, then back in.

Dr. G said, “We need—”

“A decoy,” I said.

I jogged back to the office and grabbed the box of communion wafers.

In the front room, Pastor Rudy and Luke sat on the seats—the pastor relaxed, Luke anxious—while Hootan paced in front of them, still holding his hand in his front pocket.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked him.

“What?” Hootan asked.

“The hand thing. Either show them the gun or not. What’s the deal with hiding it, but letting everyone know you’re hiding it?”

Hootan resentfully removed his hand from his pouch, sans gun. He looked at the box in my hand. “Did you find it?”

“I have to test it, but I’m ninety percent sure the pastor here is delivering it through these.”

“Crackers?”

Oh, right. Muslim. “Communion wafers,” I said. “The powder form of the drug mixes easily with unleavened bread.”

Luke looked surprised. Pastor Rudy seemed calm. “You’re welcome to them,” he said to me.

“If you’re wrong—,” Hootan said.

“Then we come back and bust up the joint. Or whatever it is gangsters do.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Dr. G said.

Luke said to the pastor, “You’re not just going to let them walk out of here?”

Rudy patted the man’s arm. “Everything works out, Luke.” He looked at me. “
Vaya con dios.
”

“Like I have any choice,” I said.

*   *   *

Hootan, his mission accomplished now, dropped me off at Bobby’s apartment. It worried me that I didn’t have to give him directions.

Before I went in the building, I used the flip phone Fayza had given me to call the hospital. I had to speak my way through half a dozen options until the patient phone rang on the NAT ward. If you’re looking for the last pay phones in North America, they’re all located in psych wards.