iD (18 page)

Javier stepped away. “What?”

“It’s true. They’re going to poison the entire system. In a single generation, the total vN population will be diminished to the point of practical extinction.”

He shook his head. He thought of his iteration inside him. If he didn’t grow it quickly enough, it would die there in his belly. “We’ll eat garbage. We’ll stock up.”

“They know. They’re prepared. They’ve had this plan since the beginning. They don’t care if it takes years.”

He remembered thinking the same thing about Powell. Now he might not have those years. Now, he needed Amy more than ever. Which meant he needed Holberton.

Fuck.

“Do you have access to Holberton’s files?”

“Some of them. Why?”

“Give me the login.”

“But–”

“Trust me, Jack. It’s bad enough you escaped – you don’t want to know what I’m trying to do.”

Jack beamed. “You’re trying to bring her back, Javier. That’s what you always do.”

A car whispered alongside them. Its door opened. Inside, a woman was crooning “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Jack whistled low. “Deus ex machina.”

“Don’t get in there. It’s Portia. She’ll crash you.”

Jack looked around. “You know, I think I’ll take my chances.” He gave Javier a sudden hug. It was an awkward straight male in-law hug, but it was still nice. Jack patted his back. Actually patted it. “The password is usually
Imperial House.
Merry Christmas.”

And then the car was gone.

His legs were exhausted. They felt like they’d been jumping for miles. And they had been. He had journeyed too far in too short a time. He’d survived fire and water and the belly of a whale. He was here, now, in the crossroads of an artificial city, and praying for this to be real.

What had Alice said?
They’re always with us.
 

“Say it’s you,” he said. “Just tell me you’re there. Tell me you’re listening.”

The city remained quiet. Maybe it was just Portia, messing with him. That would be like her: holding out hope and snatching it back. Making him believe, and grinding his faith under her heel. There was no moment she couldn’t ruin. No happiness of his that she hadn’t tried her very best to destroy utterly. None that he hadn’t already destroyed himself.

“Please,
querida.
Please.” His legs were so tired. They crumpled beneath him. The asphalt was warm on his knees. He shut his eyes.
“Please.
Forgive me.
Please.”
 

The car was returning. He opened his eyes. The buildings were dark. And Holberton’s car was there, now. Leaving the door hanging open, Holberton ran out into the street.

“Jesus!” Holberton lifted him up. “Holy shit, Javier! I almost ran you over! Fuck!”

The towers were black and silent.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Holberton said.

Javier turned to him. “Can we go to your place, now?”

 

12:
I’ll Be Seeing You
 

 

“We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”
 

“What does that mean?” Javier asks.
 

Ignacio shrugs. “I think it’s a reference within the poem to another poem.
The Inferno
, I think. That part’s about a count who gets locked up in a tower with all his sons and grandsons and then gets left to starve.”
 

Javier turns over to face Ignacio. He is still small enough to fit comfortably beside him in the bunk, but only just. “At least they had each other.”
 

“Yeah, they had each other for dinner.”
 

“Eww…”
 

“It happens. It used to happen here, more often.”
 

Javier sees a flash of pixels, and shudders. “Stop talking about it.”
 

Ignacio pets his hair. “OK. Sorry.”
 

Outside, the rain beats down on the concrete as though it, too, is a warden itching for someone to punish. It hems them in just as effectively. They have already bathed in it, having taken some homemade soap gotten from pigeon fat and ashes and stolen aftershave out to the yard with them for the hour. Now they are drying off, sort of. The sheets reek of mildew. Then again, so does everything else.
 

“We have to get you out of here,
conejito
. You have to eat more, and get bigger, so you can hop the fence.”
 

Javier shakes his head. “I don’t want to leave you.”
 

“I’m going to be here for a long time,
conejito.
You don’t have to be. You shouldn’t be.”
 

Javier rolls away. “Did I do something bad?”
 

“
Mierda,
no. You didn’t do anything. That’s the point. You didn’t do anything wrong. You don’t deserve to be here. You tried to shoplift, and you screwed up. I’m not even sure that’s a real crime.”
 

“Does it matter?”
 

“Of course it matters! The law matters. Even here. Your being here should be an indictment of the system, not how the system functions.”
 

Ignacio often talks about “the system.” Javier isn’t entirely sure what he means by it – whether he means the prison, or Nicaragua, or even the whole world. The scale of the conversation seems to change, night to night. Sometimes he wakes up and Ignacio is writing furiously. During visiting hours, he is always talking to a lot of humans – men and women who stare at him with vacant adoration, who laugh at his jokes even when they’re not funny and hug him hard so he won’t see them shedding the tears that have waited patiently for the entirety of the visit. Javier is the one who sees those things, not Ignacio. He tries to talk to Ignacio about them, sometimes, but Ignacio always waves him off.
 

“I’m just a man,” he says.
 

Once, Javier replied with a question: “Will I be a man, when I grow up? Is there another word for grown-up vN?”
 

Ignacio shrugged. “I don’t know. You’ll look like a man. A certain kind of man, but a man. You’ll be a machine, though. But that is all this world allows any of us to be.” He paused to rebutton Javier’s shirt and to pull a stray thread away from it decisively. He wound the thread around his finger and stuck it in his pocket. It would probably be useful, later. He rested his hands on Javier’s little shoulders. “Whoever you turn out to be, you’ll have to make peace with that. Someday you’ll look at where you are, and all the choices that brought you there, and you’ll remember everyone you ever met and everything you ever said, and you’ll have to make peace with that, even if it doesn’t turn out the way you wanted.”
 

Now, lying in the mouldering bunk, Javier knows things must not have turned out the way Ignacio wanted. He has a wife at home. Dionisia. They met in the visitation yard when she was visiting her brother. They courted on Saturdays. She brought fruit and vegetables, and he folded little things for her out of leaves: cranes, boxes, fortune-tellers, even unicorns. They have a baby girl, together. She doesn’t always come to visit. The crowds are too big for her, Ignacio says. She knew him when he was nobody. When he was nothing. And she doesn’t always like to share.
 

“I wish you could go live with her, when you get out of here,” Ignacio said, once. “But it’s the first place they’d look, I think.”
 

Ignacio is more excited about Javier’s escape than he is his own release. He and his lawyer – an elderly, functional alcoholic named Gabriel – have argued about it, many times.
 

“Did you know that you two are in here because of the same person?” Gabriel had asked, once. “Well, not a person, an entity. A company.” Gabriel’s knobby old finger drew a line between the two of them. “The company that made you, and the one that he pirates the patterns from, they’re the same. Lionheart.”
 

“We’re like family, then,” Ignacio said.
 

“Well, they’re also the same company that makes the cameras here and programs them, so keep that in mind.”
 

They know the cameras well. The cameras are the newest, cleanest thing about the place. They’re fuelled wirelessly, no batteries, nothing to short out. The cameras know their faces, their gaits, even their hand gestures. The cameras tell them where to go, at least indirectly. They’re part of the prison scheduling system, which pings their cuffs at certain times of day to go left or right until they arrive at a certain room for a specific job. Javier has done most every kind of job, now: mail, laundry, garbage, kitchen, library. They keep him out of the infirmary because it might trigger him, but sometimes he delivers things there because he moves more quickly than the others.
 

His favourite job is the library job. He brings the spines of all the books right to the front of each shelf so no dust accumulates there. He alphabetizes, and writes notes to the captains of each unit to tell their people to return things. Sometimes, it even works. Guys who beat the shit out of each other are strangely respectful of books. Some of them have never seen the printed kind, before. One even cried the first time he ripped out a page by accident. Then the whole book fell apart and he just lost it. He howled and sobbed and rocked back and forth on his knees, stubby fingers searching the pages, trying to put them back in order.
 

“It’s OK,” Javier told him. “It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s just a story. It’s not even real.”
 

But mostly, his job is to stop fights.
 

They start in odd places. In the yard, in the library, in the shower. He spots them, goes a bit blind, and jumps in. It’s the surprise that stops the fight, most of the time. How high he can jump. How precisely he can land on someone’s shoulders. Sometimes it’s someone getting raped. Ignacio explained rape the first time someone beat him up for spending too much time with Javier.
 

“He thought I was a baby-raper,” he said. “I explained that we were just friends.”
 

“Rape?”
 

“When you fuck someone without their wanting it,” Ignacio said. “Sex is like a game. It takes two people – or more, I guess, if you want – to play, and both players have to agree to the rules ahead of time. Anything else is cheating.”
 

 

When he woke up, the car had stopped. “We’re here.”

“Here” was a house in the middle of the desert. There was nothing else around it, just an expanse of sagebrush and dusty red earth stretching up into mounts flat as molars under a cloudless blue dome. If he looked carefully, he could see white specks that might be houses up in the mountains. But it was mostly nothing. Nothing, with a faint dusting of snow.

“You can see someone coming for miles,” Holberton said. “Which, as you might imagine, is just how I like it.”

Javier helped him with the other luggage. The house was ringed by scrub pine and an iron fence with a burnished copper gate. The gate swung open onto a raked gravel yard, with a flagstone path down the middle. The path led to a glass door set in a jagged glass and concrete wall. From one side of the house, he could see out the other.

“You know, for someone who values his privacy, your house is awfully open.”

“My bedroom walls are solid,” Holberton said, thumbing open the door.

The door opened onto an open space broken only by concrete arches. The floor was grey marble. Everything was grey. The dining table, the wall of pressed earth with a fireplace cut out of it, the marble bench beneath it, the shag rug in front of it. Pearl, graphite, charcoal.

“I find it soothing,” Holberton said. “I spend all day looking at swatches. When I’m done, my eyes need a palate cleanser.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to.”

They carried the luggage into Holberton’s bedroom. It was downstairs. As he’d said, the walls were solid – save for one sliding glass door that opened directly onto a pool. The pool curved around the lower level of the house. From the bedroom, you could swim to the downstairs patio and fountain, and walk into another, grander living room and an impeccably clean kitchen with grey marble countertops.

The bedroom was the only room in the house with any colour. This colour was a deep purple like an overripe eggplant. It was on the bedspread. When Javier ran his hand over it, it pushed up under his palm like a cat.

“What the… ?”

“Oh, that,” Holberton said. “It’s just smartcloth. It moulds to your body. I get very cold, at night.”

Javier snorted. “You could try pyjamas.”

“Now, where would the fun be in that?” Holberton’s silvery brows rose. “Do you want a shower, or anything? You seem like you could use one.”

Javier smiled and his eyes flicked to the bed. There was no time like the present. He’d been offered enough opportunities; Holberton’s intentions were clear. “Maybe later.”

Javier took his wrist and tugged gently. They were closer to eye level, that way. Up close, most men looked older. Liver spots, lack of sleep, waistlines gaining ground as hairlines lost it. But Holberton looked younger. His eyes – Amy’s eyes – still held some wonder in them. They were searching Javier, now, flicking back and forth, as though there were a story printed on his skin. And then he was kissing him. It was a solid kiss, firm and warm and tight as a good handshake. Holberton even squeezed Javier’s hands as he did it.

When he pulled away, he said: “I love how direct you people all are. You’re so honest. So free of bullshit.”

Javier grinned. “You have no idea.”

 

Javier had simulated exactly how this would go. Holberton likely had more than the usual number of sexual tripwires to watch out for; growing up Jonah LeMarque’s son would have ensured that. Javier was prepared to be gentle with him, or rough, or tender, or impersonal, to say filthy things or nothing at all, to speak only in Spanish (it was surprising, the number of English speakers who asked for that), to undress him piece by piece or pop off all his buttons, to get down on his knees immediately or wait to be asked. He could do it all, within the failsafe’s parameters, provided he received the request.

But rather than request anything, Holberton just undressed him and peeled back the furry coverlet from the giant circular bed. “I’m exhausted,” he explained, as he wriggled in beside Javier.

Javier wriggled in turn. “Doesn’t seem like it, to me.”

Holberton chuckled. “You’re too kind.” He inhaled deeply. “You smell good.”

Like waffles, probably. That's what Jack had said. “It’s the carbon.”

Holberton’s hand drifted across Javier’s chest.

“Are you sure you’re OK?” Holberton asked.

Javier turned around. He looked Holberton in the eye. His hand trailed south. “Would you like me to show you how OK I am?”

Holberton’s breath caught in his throat. His stomach jumped under Javier’s fingers. Then he was in Javier’s hand, and the whites of his eyes rolled up a little. Javier slid down under the covers.

“So it’s true what they say.”

“What’s that?” Holberton asked.

“If there’s smoke in the chimney, there’s fire in the hearth.”

Holberton was laughing when Javier’s mouth closed over him. And then most of what he had to say involved curse words and invocations to God. If Javier was going to con Holberton, he could at least make sure the mark enjoyed it.

It was calming, in a way. It was calming in the way that doing something he’d done a bunch of times was calming. Like jumping from tree to tree, or counting his sons’ fingers and toes. He was sure other people felt this way about cutting cold butter into pie crust, or knitting scarves, or editing photos, or brushing curls of cedar away from a piece of whittling. A simple process, easily repeated, with an obvious outcome and built-in sense of achievement. Something almost everyone could do, or learn to do, but which one could excel at if given ample opportunity. He knew who he was, when he was doing this.

“You know why humans have to hold onto your head, like that?” Holberton asked, when it was over.

Javier knew how this joke ended, already. He’d heard it before. But he asked why, anyway.

“It’s to keep from applauding,” Holberton answered, clapping his hands together. He checked the time. “Wow. Do you know how late it is? Of course you do. You have an internal clock.”

“That’s not even my best time,” Javier said.

“Your best time?”

“My record.”

“You have a
record
?”

He did. In both senses of the term. But Holberton didn’t need to know about the other one. “Two hours, forty-two minutes.”