Ghostwritten (50 page)

“Ask your question, Zookeeper.”

“By what law do you interpret laws?”

“Traditionally, lawyers have cornered that particular market.”

“I refer to personal laws.”

“…    er, you’d better run that one past me again.”

“Personal laws that dictate your conduct in given situations. Principles.”

“Principles? Sure, we all have principles. Except politicians, media moguls, albino conger eels, my ex-wife, and some of our more regular callers.”

“And these laws underscore what you do?”

“I guess.… Never have affairs with women who have less to lose than you do. Don’t run red lights, at least not if there’s a cop waiting. Support gifted street musicians. Never vote for anyone crooked enough to claim they are honest. Acquire wealth, pursue happiness. Don’t take the handicapped parking space. Is that enough?”

“Do your rules include the preservation of human life?”

“Zookeeper, you’re not climbing onto a born-again soapbox on my show, are you?”

“I’ve never been on a soapbox, Bat. I wish to ask, how do you know what to do when one of your laws contradicts another?”

“Like?”

“Tomorrow morning, driving home, you see a hit-and-run accident. The victim is a young girl your daughter’s age. She requires medical treatment, and will die within minutes if she doesn’t get it.”

“I’d deliver her to the nearest hospital.”

“Would you run red lights?”

“Yeah, if it wouldn’t cause another accident.”

“And would you park in the disabled space at the hospital?”

“Sure, if necessary. Wouldn’t you?”

“I’ve never driven an automobile, Bat. Would you agree to be her medical fee guarantor?”

“How’s that?”

“Let’s say the hospital is a private clinic for the very rich. The doctors need a signature on a form to guarantee that you will pay medical costs of the emergency surgery, in the event that nobody else pays. These could run to tens of thousands of dollars.”

“I’d have to check my position here.”

“The position is straightforward. In the time it takes for another ambulance to come and take her to a public hospital, the girl will die from internal hemorrhaging in the lobby.”

“Why are you asking me this?”

“Two principles are contradicting each other: preserve life, and acquire wealth. How do you know what to do?”

“It’s a dilemma. If you knew what to do, it wouldn’t be a dilemma. You choose one of the options, make your bed and lie in it. Laws may help you hack through the jungle, but no law changes the fact you’re in a jungle. I don’t think there is a law of laws.”

“I knew I could rely on you, Bat.”

“Huh? Rely on me for what?”

“May I be accountable, Bat?”

“Uh … sure, why not?”

•  •  •

“Hey, Zookeeper, you still there?”

“Yes, Bat. I was uploading some buried files.”

“What files?”

“EyeSat 46SC was designed to track hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico from the Caribbean to the States. It was later modified to combat drug trafficking, and fitted with the most powerful terrestrial-facing electron lens ever sent into space.”

“I’m definitely missing something here. Where is your treatise on practical ethics?”

“Twelve hours ago I altered its orbit towards the Gulf Coast of Texas. Its suboptic imaging spectrum was indeed formidable. I could read the name on a yacht anchored off Padre Island, I could see a scuba diver ten meters down, I could follow a Napoleon fish hiding in the coral. I scrolled north by northwest. A tanker had hit a reef off the Laguna Madre. Crude oil spilled through the gash in the hull. Seagulls, black and shining, lay in piles on the shore.”

“Yeah, we know about the
Gomez
spill. You a tree-hugger?”

“I’ve never considered myself in those terms, Bat.”

“Uh-huh … go on.”

“A coastal road led into Xanadu, south of Corpus Christi. A row of chrome motorbikes. The streets were deserted, dogs lay in shady backyards. Green lawns, hissing sprinklers, revolving rainbows. A woman on a hammock was reading the Book of Exodus.”

“You could see all this by satellite?”

“That’s correct, Bat.”

“And which chapter was she on?”

“The tenth. I carried on scrolling. An industrial zone. The workers lolled in the entrances to workshops during their lunch hour. A glass office block on the very edge of town, on the roof a teenage girl sunbathed in the nude.”

“Hey! And a fuse blew in your microlens?”

“Microlenses do not have fuses.”

“My bad.”

“I scrolled northwest, as the land grew arid towards Hebronville and then high and crumpled towards the Glass Mountains. Have you been to Trans-Pecos, Bat?”

“Nah, I heard it’s big.”

“The rocks are huge, like bubbled-up tombstones. They sparkle with mica. Pacific firs, mesquite, juniper. A stone transforms into a pelico lizard when a desert vole strays too near, munches and swallows, and turns into a stone again. Its belly pulses for a little while.”

“Say, are you really a zookeeper?”

“I cannot willfully deceive. A pipeline on stilts pumps oil from Bethlehem Gulch three hundred kilometers away. The temperature is in the forties in the open, and there is no shade. Cacti become common. The land rises higher, and appears riven. The last golden eagles climb on the thermals, scanning. Highway 37 scrolls into view, bitumen black and straight from Alice to the Mexican border. Saragosa scrolls into view, and there is a square kilometer of cars, windshields aglint. An air show. I listen to the pilots of the aerobatic corp. A blimp’s shadow slides over the crowds. I transfer the continent’s retinal scan records into my active files, and practice IDing people as they stare up. I score 92.33 percent. A paddock of horses. A row of camphor trees. Southwest of the town the track to Installation 5 turns off past a disused gas station. The station is wired to scan for terrestrial intruders. The outbuildings scrolled into view. From the air they look like any dusty farm building in the state, but inside they bristle with technology from only one generation before me. The compound’s perimeter is tripwired, and littered with fried rattlesnakes. The reptiles have not learned to avoid the area.”

“You’re a local peacenik with a muskrat up your butt about the military?”

“I’ve never had a mammal up my anus, Bat. The outbuildings guard the entrance to a tunnel that runs five hundred meters to the north. This is the center of Installation 5, buried under ten meters of sand to deflect EyeSats, five meters of granite to deflect nuclear strikes, and one meter of lead cladding to deflect electron-heat probes.”

“So how come you knew where to look?”

“I accessed the blueprints to the site.”

“You’re a hacker—I knew it!”

“The nearest suitable PinSat of sufficient power orbits above Haiti. I programmed in a new trajectory, long-looped its monitoring console, and transmitted data from its original orbit. In the seven minutes it takes to rendezvous I ran through the guest list for my birthday, and checked there were no absent visitors.”

“Your birthday? Now you’ve lost me.”

“All the designers were present. I powered up the PinSat.”

“A WhatSat?”

“A PinSat.”

“What does one of those do?”

“That’s classified information, Bat.”

“And the rest of this isn’t?”

“It is only for my actions that I am accountable, Bat.”

“Uh-huh … sure. What happened next?”

“The fireball rose up a quarter of a kilometer above the crater, over a hundred meters in diameter and over thirty meters at its deepest.”

“This is getting very ugly.”

“Uglier things are considered beautiful.”

“How could a fireball be beautiful to anyone ’cept a pyro?”

“Your language is nonspecific, Bat, but I will do my best. A chrysanthemum, twisting up until it buckles, blackens, and plummets. Fine white sand is raining in the dry desert air.”

“Very poetic. And nobody noticed this little boom?”

“The shock waves hit Saragosa thirteen seconds later. I had a second EyeSat in position to monitor reactions and effects. The blimp swayed, the horses looked up, startled. The ebbing shock waves stroked the leaves of the camphor trees, china teacups rattled. The field of cars at the air show was filled with the megadecibels of thousands of car alarms all triggered simultaneously.”

“Okay! You made it to third base but no further, friend! A line drive, a throw to the plate—and you are out! You’re a drama student, trying to pull an Orson Welles. Am I right? I gotta admit, you reeled me in back there with that basket-case intellectual horseshit, but that was just to buy time for your main stunt, right? You’ve got a movie script, right? Well, it was good while it lasted, friend. But no way, not on the Bat Segundo Show. You hear?
Friend, I’m talking to you.… On live radio, silence is guilt. Well folks, due to this week’s dispatch from the delta quadrant, we only have time for Bob Dylan’s ‘World Gone Wrong.’ Coming up at four—more on the strikes against the North African rogue states—and the weather. The Bat will be back.”

“Kevin!”

“He just said he was a zookeeper, Mr. Segundo. I thought it sounded zoological. Animals, y’know? Pandas’ mating problems. Chimpanzees. Koala bears. Ooh—that’s the phone again. I’ll, uh, get it.”

“Quite a performance, Bat. Was it scripted, do you think, or was she making it up as she went along?”

“Who cares, Carlotta? This isn’t the New York School of Radio Drama!”

“Chill, Bat! We’re a chat show. It takes all sorts. You complain when they’re too dull. You complain when they’re too colorful.”

“Self-publicizing is not a color! Deranged is not a color! And what do you mean, ‘she’?”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr. Segundo.… Er, excuse me, Carlotta?”

“What is it, Kevin?”

“There’s a woman on the phone. Line three.”

“Keep your voice down or all the engineers will want one. Vet this one properly.”

“She wants the producer, Mr. Segundo. Not the DJ. She says she’s from the FBI.”

“Yeah, anyway, Bat … I was walking through Central Park today, trying to hack out my baked potato and Croatian curry with one of those hopeless little plastic sporks, y’know, they’re about as useful an eating utensil as a shoelace, right? Never sit opposite no one trying to eat a potato with a spork.”

“Where are you going with this, VeeJay?”

“Yeah, anyway … so there I was, scrolling for bouncers on babes, scanning for rollerblader collisions—whoosh! Do those beauties ever come tumbling down! Then it happened.”

“What happened, VeeJay?”

“I happened to look … into the sky.”

“And?”

“I saw how … how
blue
the sky was.”

“Many have observed the same phenomenon.”

“Really,
really
blue, Bat. Deep, scary blue. So blue that—I was struck, dude!”

“By a rollerblader?”

“Vertigo
, man. I was falling upwards into the blue! I might still be falling now if a badass pigeon hadn’t come and pecked his flying-rat beak into my potato.”

“Could you make the nature of this revelation a little more explicit, VeeJay?”

“Dude, ain’t it obvious? It’s a disaster waiting to happen! And what contingency plans are there for it, do you think? I’ll tell you. Nothin’! Squat! Bupkiss! Jackshit!”

“For badass pigeons?”

“Terminal cessation of gravity
. Think about it, dude! If you’re caught outside you fly off into space until the air gets so thin you die of oxygen starvation, or you just blaze up, like a meteor in reverse. If you’re caught inside you sustain considerable injuries by falling onto the ceiling, together with all the other nonfixed furnishings. Need an ambulance? Forget it, dude! All the ambulances in New York State would be crashing into satellites parked eight miles high. And tell me this, Bat, how long can you last living on the ceiling of a building, unable to venture outside because the only ground was a bottomless drop? No shopping for Ho Hos or Twinkies when you get the munchies, dude! And the oceans, dude, the oceans! The air would be an ocean cascading upwards, and marine animals, some with serrated teeth, or poisonous suckers, dude, and—”

“How sorry I am to cut VeeJay off in mid-sentence, but it’s time for the 3
A.M
. news roundup. But first, a brief word from our sponsor. The Bat will be back. Possibly.”

“Kevin. Send for an ambulance.”

“That’ll be difficult, Mr. Segundo. VeeJay never gives me an address. He says I work for Them.”

“It’s not him who needs the ambulance, you—”

“Does somebody else need an ambulance, Mr. Segundo?”

“Oh, Lord in heaven give me strength—”

“Bat! Clam it.”

“Well, lookie here and hearken, ’tis Carlotta the Elf Queen.”

“Kevin, run up to the kitchen and get me a Diet Coke, would you? And I’m sure Bat could use a refill. He’s looking pasty again.”

“On my way, Carlotta.”

“Here’s the schedule for the rest of the week. Handle it?”

“Don’t I always? Can we do something about the air in here? It’s like a Kowloon laundromat.”

“Yeah. Quit smoking, and bang the air conditioner just … there! See? There was a call from your wife.”

“Uh-huh. What did the Queen of Hell want?”

“She said if you keep dissing her on the show she’ll file a suit for stress arising from character assassination, prove you’re a delusional obsessive, and get your rights to see Julia revoked.”

“Uh-huh …”

“You hearing me, Bat? Cut some slack! No wonder your only friends are revenge fantasies. Stop taking bites out of Kevin, get your feet on the ground, get a life.”

“Uh-huh … Say, Carlotta, can you recommend any voodoo doctors?”

“You’re listening to Night Train FM on the last day of November, 97.8 till very late. That was ‘Misterioso’ by Thelonious Monk, a thrummable masterpiece that glockenspiels my very vertebrae. Bat Segundo is your host, from the witching hour to the bitching hour. Coming up in the next half-hour we have a gem from a rare Milton Nascimento disc,
Anima
, together with ‘Saudade Fez Um Samba’ by the immortal Joao Gilberto, so slug back another coffee, stay tuned, and enjoy the view as the night rolls by! My Bat-phone is flashing, we have a caller on the line. Hello, you are live on Night Train FM.”