Going Shogun (11 page)

“Eat me, drink me,” Forklift says,
and it reminds me of another one of his pickup lines.

“Yeah, but it’s the other way
around,” I say.  “She drinks and shrinks, eats and grows.”

“Right,” Forklift says.  “And that’s
about all I got from Mr. Carroll.  It probably won’t surprise you to learn I
wasn’t too fond of reading.”

“Says the guy that was quoting
Shakespeare earlier,” I chide.

Bingo giggles.  It’s a melody I
could listen to forever.  She says, “I
am
surprised,” and then continues
with, “but not that much.  Alice eats what?  Oh, the cake!  And then she gets
huge.  I remember something about crying, right?  Don’t her tears create a
river?”

“Cry me a river,” I say.  “And then
she meets that mouse and pisses him off because she asks him where her cat
is.”  I know some French because taking a foreign language class was an
under-requirement for my degree.  In my snootiest accent, or at least in what
French
used
to sound like before they were absorbed by Luxembourg in
WWIV, I add, “
Ou est ma chatte?
” 

Forklift perks up, alert, like a
gopher with his head out of a hole.  “What did you just say?”

“
Ou est ma chatte? 
It means,
‘Where is my cat?’”

He nearly shouts,
“Cat!” but
turns it down from 11 at the last second.  Two women with matching pink mohawks
overhear him and begin to snicker.

Bingo looks confused.  She says, “He
went to find his cat?  Like an animal shelter or something?”

“Yes!” Forklift says.  “I mean, no,
not a
cat
cat.  His girlfriend.  Catherine.”

I’m not as excited about this as
Forklift is because it seems too easy.  If a couple of goofball waiters and one
ridiculously hot former waitress can figure it out, what’s there to say some
Board Agents with every bit of intelligence known to man available at their
fingertips wouldn’t figure it out in the time it takes them to type a query
into their phones?  Which, by the way, connect directly to The Board’s database
called the Information Collective. 

“To preserve the intellect of the
human race,” they say.

It’s the
great-great-great-great-great-great grandson of some massive search engine
corporation.  Historical records are slightly unclear, but from what anyone can
reasonably gather, it was this big internet company that tried to go Napoleon
on the entire Earth’s technological front and failed.  Their Waterloo was The
Board’s first major initiative.

Shut them down, shut them up, and
then absorb them.  I can’t tell you how many books I read in my Cultural
History classes that describe identical scenarios with so many corporate giants. 

The same thing happened to that
enormous social network that had billions of members all across the planet, but
at least the founder’s ancestral line has held a seat on The Board since their
Assimilation. 

I say to Forklift, “LX has a girlfriend
named Catherine, and you think that’s what he means by ‘down the rabbit hole’? 
It’s a bit of a stretch, dude.  How many other allegorical references to
thousands of other things are in
Alice in Wonderland
?”

“Allegori-what?”

“Never mind.  I’m just saying there
are so many things in that book that could mean anything.  Alice cries a river
of tears.  Maybe he was depressed about wiping his system and wanted time alone
to cry about it.  Or at some point Alice goes to a race with some of animals
and everybody runs in circles, yeah?  He could be down at that R12 dog track
over by Haywood.”

Bingo says, “I’m with Chris on this
one, Forky,” and I can see him getting more and more agitated with each
second.  He clearly thinks he knows what he’s talking about.  She adds, “We
really need to be careful so we’re not running around the city all night
chasing dead ends.  The crazier we are, the bigger the chance we have of
tripping over some Board Agent’s foot and riding P12 into the sunset.”

I’m starting to gather that Bingo
only wants to Rescind so far.  There
is
a life to be had, you know.

Forklift rolls his eyes, seemingly
at the ham-headed ineptitude of his partners in crime.  “Dude and dudette, for
reals, if you hopscotch back a pre-Cambrian moment, you’ll be daylight
whiplashed to learn ol’ Forkness went wham bam on the little kitty’s hoo-hah
back when.”

Sometimes he can’t help himself.

“You slept with LX’s girlfriend?” I
ask.

“Yup.  I plowed the fields. 
Johnnied her apple seed.  Swam up her stream.”

“Enough,” Bingo says, laughing and
feigning disgust at the same time.  “Have you no shame, you nasty little
bastard?”

“This was pre-LX, so no biggums. 
Thing is, girly-wirly has a tattoo of that big smiling cat from
Alice
,
right where the kitty fur should be instead.”

“You’re joking,” I say.

“I don’t go comedian when it comes
to a lady’s details, Brick-Tock.  Respect.  So, it’s her, deffy def.”  He
stands, pulls his phone out of his pocket and says, “Gotta go digital smoke
signal.  Back in two.”  Before he walks away, he adds, “And don’t get
skatepunked by any highboys while I’m
in absentia
.”

“Wait, who are you calling,
Forklift?  We got things to talk about.”

“
Back in two
, buddy, dig
digs?  Hang.”

We put the conversation on pause for
a moment and let him go.  As he steps outside, just like the typical law of
nature in a restaurant, the food arrives when someone from the party leaves the
table.  Inevitable.

Flo
shows up with a tray of our super
nummy noms.  As she divvies it up, I see that my burger is half the size of my
head, and as tall as a pile of Wishful Thinking’s Vanilla Bean Alligator
Bites.  It’s dripping with grease and layered with four different kinds of
thick, heady cheeses that would be better suited to a wine pairing, but I don’t
care.  It’s a real burger, damn it, and I’m going shogun on it.

Bingo’s salad is respectable in its
presentation but not what I’d call glamorous, and Rodney Bourdain might scoff
at it on his show
Lunchtimes of the Rich and R4
.  It looks edible
though, which is more than I can say for most pointless piles of leafy greens. 

The smell of the bacon on Forklift’s
BLT is maddeningly good and I wish I’d ordered a side of it for my Cheeseburger
Beast.  Since he’s off solving life’s problems with whoever is on the other end
of the phone, I reach over to grab a piece of the fatty part he doesn’t like
when I notice something white underneath the top slice of bread.  It looks like
a piece of paper, and
Flo
sees me see it.

I pause with my hand in mid-air as I
glance up at her.  She smiles and pats a motherly pat on my shoulder.  She
says, “Be careful, honey,” (huh-neh), “give it a couple, then look,” and walks
away. 

What was that all about?
I think. 
‘Be careful?’ Be
careful with what?
 

“What was that all about?” Bingo
asks, reading my mind.  “Be careful with what?”

I realize my hand is
still
in
the air and how weird I must look, so I put it down and reach for my burger. 
My stomach is whirling like a blender as the fight or flight sensation kicks
in.  I feel scared, watched, observed.  Softly, and subtly, and deftly, I say,
“Don’t go geisha, but something is up.  Look at Forklift’s sandwich.  No, up
top there.  Yeah, under the top piece of bread.  See that?”

“What is that?” she whispers.  “Is
that a piece of paper?”  She starts to look around the room, but I stop her. 

“Yes, and don’t look yet.  I think
she’s trying to warn us about something.”

“
Warn
us?  About what?  We’re
in the R10 Rebel’s restaurant at 2:30 in the morning with nothing but a bunch
of half-drunk Rescinders eating after-party snacks.  What could she possibly
want to warn us about?  Don’t eat the bacon?  She’s probably giving Forklift
her number so he can Johnnie her apple seed.”

“True, but—”

Before I can stop her, Bingo shoots
her hand across the table like a viper strike and grabs the piece of paper out
of the sandwich, which remains undisturbed.  It reminds me of how magicians
used to rip the tablecloth from underneath a finely decked out place setting. 
I haven’t watched one perform since they were all locked up for heresy during
the Evangelical Movement.

Bingo unfolds the note, and reads. 
I lean over to see what it says:

The man in the blue shirt, by the
door.  Possible BA and VERY interested in your table.

“What the hell?” Bingo says, which
says it all.

Chapter
9

Sometimes decisions are so hastily
made that they alter the course of your life forever, and they happen without
thought, without consideration to consequences, without regard to what might
come next.  Are they the right ones?  Time tells.  Time is the judge. 

Repercussions are the aftershocks of
an earthquake moment.

What I do next happens instinctively,
so fluid in its execution that it seems effortlessly natural, like it’s
supposed to
be
.  It’s accidentally on purpose, driven by the unseen
force that guides the universe, that makes the tides move, that makes a rose
open its petals to accept the warming rays of sunshine.  It’s the undercurrent
of a higher power.

Bingo drops the note to the table
and as her head turns to look for the man in the blue shirt, I react.  My first
thought is to distract her, to keep her from giving us away, to keep him from
finding out that
we're in the know
.  And to keep that from happening, to
prevent a grave error that’s attributed to nothing more than her inherent
curiosity, I make what is hopefully one of my best decisions ever...

I kiss her.

The world explodes.

Fireball, Fireball, Fireba—oh, fuck
it.

All five senses redline and what was
merely an attempt at a diversion turns into a fantastic frenzy of sensation,
and amazingly, Bingo returns the pressure of lip on lip.  She’s kissing me back
and this realization opens up a larger awareness of a holy-shit situation.

Wow.  I should’ve been doing this
all along.

What feels like the length of time
for evolution to modify a species lasts only a couple of seconds.

Bingo and I simultaneously open our
eyes and connect our gazes, long enough for both of us to register what’s
happening.  Her lips remain attached to mine as I feel them stretch thin,
working their way into a smile.  She pulls back slightly, starts to say, “I was
waiting for—”

And in the next instant, fear shows
up in her eyes like an unwanted houseguest.  Like when you’re having a
perfectly good time on Boardmas morning, opening presents, and smelly Aunt Edna
bursts through the door with a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of vodka in
the other.

I have a guess as to what she’s reacting
to and it’s confirmed when I whip around to see the man in the blue shirt
standing, confronting Forklift.  They’re talking about something but I can’t
hear what.  He points to Forklift’s pants leg and makes some gesture to
question what’s going on down there.

Flo
’s suspicions that he’s a BA are
right on.  I get a glimpse of his gold-tinted badge underneath his jacket,
parked on his belt alongside a Board-issued firearm.    

I glance to see what he’s pointing
at, and with the help of the overhead lights’ searing blaze, I see a dark, red
smear that’s in glaring contrast to the stark-white, bleached material of Forklift’s
karate gi.  It looks like an elongated handprint, and then I remember—

The fire escape. 

What I thought might have been blood. 
What I wiped on Forklift as we were climbing. 

Could that have truly been blood? 
If so, whose?  LX’s?  What if he was wounded while he was fighting with
Shoobocks?  What if he crawled off to die in an alley? 

We could be chasing a ghost down the
rabbit hole.

I look up.  The BA is grilling
Forklift.

Board Agents are trained to be
ultra-suspicious of everything that’s not part of the SOP of daily life, and
bless him and his individuality, but Forklift stands out like the lone French
fry in a basket of tater tots.  It’s likely that his crazy outfit and combat
boots attracted the BA’s attention, who noticed the blood stains and then
decided to play a little rough ‘n’ tumble with the goofy-looking dork.

Forklift makes an exasperated and
contemptuous wave motion too close to the Board Agent’s face, who takes it as a
threat and in some serious Kung Fu quickness has Forklift in a chokehold, feet
dangling off the ground and then immediately on his way to the yellow-tiled
floor, half in and half out of the door, grunting, struggling, fighting, trying
to get away, but he has no chance against the much bigger and much better-trained
man in the blue shirt. 

Instinct happens before thought.  I
make a move to stand, and Bingo grabs my arm.