Virtually True (4 page)

“
Sub
ject and hospitalized.”

Bong Bong’s voice hitches closer to alto than tenor. “English is difficult, not like Luzonian.”

“Uh, huh.”

“In Luzonian, you wish to tabulate your digits, you know what, addition the ‘s’ or two ‘s’.”

“Make a word plural.”

“You say two times. One ‘enemy of the state’ is ‘enemy of the state.’ Two ‘enemy of the state’ is ‘two enemy of the—”

“Before we run out of time, how about an autopsy on Aslam?”

“In Luzonian, there’s this same word for yesterday and tomorrow.” Bong Bong sighs. “Nobody cares about time.”

“Please, the autop—”

“—and no word for ‘please.’ It takes too much time to talk it.” Bong Bong’s face is robust, like a tomato.

“The autopsy. How about it?”

“He’s dead. You think this is the U.S. of A. and I say, ‘Autopsy! Autopsy! Autopsy! This American wants the autopsy for a deadly Pak.’ Why do you not make believe?”

“I’ve done too much of that already.”

A close-lipped smile spreads from ear to cauliflower ear. Bong Bong leans forward. Motions True close. “Okay. I tell a secret. Don’t say to no bodies. They think I come down with nice.” Glum silence. “We know he dies from bum in missile.”

“What kind? Who manufactured it?”

“Have you not been outside the city to the country’s side? Sure, sure this is tropical island para
dize
, good for tourist, yes, yes.” He stretches out the final syllable. “But many kind types of soldier from the jungle here have many kind types of explosions.
And
, war bleeds creativity.”

“When you were a guerilla, you saw this kind of weapon?”

Bong Bong elbow-polishes his debit machine. Puffs on it and sprays dust. “These informations are expensive.”

True wonders how it could have lain around idle long enough to get dusty. Bong Bong types in an astronomical amount and True lops off a bunch of zeros. They bargain, insincerely bandying figures back and forth, Bong Bong bragging of the importance of his information, True claiming poverty, until True pulls out an Automatic Debit Card and swipes it through.

“I give you the discount because you are my friend.” Bong Bong’s cash-box eyes register satisfaction.

“I’m touched.”

Bong Bong tells True the names of some missiles and their manufacturers. True has never heard of the companies, but that’s not unusual given that companies are constantly bought, sold, downsized, and stripped.

True looks up from his wrist-top screen. “Is it possible it was an accident?”

“Then no boom.”

“I mean was someone trying to kill the girl, not Aslam?”

“Who knows? She was maybe a little bit of crazy.”

“She was a child.”

“I tell you something. I take you Americans, stick you here for twenty years in this hot climatic condiction and you go kookie cookies too.” He twirls his fingers around his ears and whistles.

“How about a blood sample and a few tests? That would help me figure out what kind of explosive killed him.”

“What’s up? You have police indentifications?”

True shrugs.

“I do not need your help, Mister Journalist.”

True drum-rolls on Bong Bong’s desk with his fingers. “Can I see Aslam’s body? At least let me see him one last time.”

Bong Bong glances at his Automatic Debit Machine. “Okay. Let’s call it, Christian-amity. That is your religion, no?”

“Close enough.”

Bong Bong sends True along with Pidge, who leads him out of the office, down the hall, and past a cop extorting a hooker—True sees the wrist barcode wrapped languidly around the undulating man’s neck—up a metal staircase, betel nut spit staining it dull rust. On the second floor he hears a man’s screams. Hall lights hiss, brown out, flicker on, off, on. True halts in front of a faded door. Fingerprints from hundreds of sets of grubby hands seeking entry form a concentric ring around the knob. He peeks in a jaundiced window. A torture chamber. More gurgling groans, fluttering lights.

“What did he do?” True asks.

Pidge smiles through cracked teeth. He’s chawing on an indigenous root, a natural amphetamine. His eyes are bloodshot, pupils hard, and a string of spittle rappels from his lips to the floor. The steady babble of a tribal language, a confession. Interrupting Luzonian laughter soaking through the chamber’s door is the sound of a lock bolt being slid back. An officer pops out, holding a pair of weather-beaten sneakers.

Pidge chews furiously on the narc, admires the shoes. True glimpses the victim strapped to a table: naked, a crescent of blood leaking from the slit of his mouth. Wires run length and breadth. His toes claw air, seek a path to freedom. Pidge pushes True into a room a few sleepy doors away—the crematorium, a low-ceilinged coffin-shaped room, gray walls of stone blanketing a furnace where piles of naked bodies lie stacked. He thinks of the touts who hang out near Nerula’s deluxe hotels, charging for the privilege of filming the freshest corpses. A major cottage industry. No doubt Bong Bong’s in on that action too.

True imagines movement where there should be no movement. Off to the side, sitting on the room’s lone bench, a man sits, licking rice off a banana leaf, transfixed by a fizzy TV blasting a local game show. He sees True’s with Pidge and goes back to his meal.

Smoke stains his lungs. True feels himself losing control, but Pidge’s insipid laughter helps him focus on what needs to be done. Close up, he sees why he senses movement. Flies. Feasting on these lifeless souls. On top of a pile is an old woman, a burn mark hyphenating her face, her skin a glutinous pallor. A boy from an ethnic enclave in the country’s disputed Northwest territory stares up in wonder. True scouts for Aslam.

It’s Pidge who helps. Calls the man on the bench. “Mug!”

Mug breaks his TV trance, and after licking the leaf clean, steps over and around bodies. He pulls stiff corpses from the tops of piles, drags them by their ankles. True notices odd scars on the bodies, slithering gashes along their sides, gaping holes in chests, missing eyes. One with blood soaking the floor must have been alive when he was dumped here. Another with a crushed cheekbone was beaten to death. Mug topples over a heap of cadavers. Near the bottom, True sees him—not just his clothes, shoes, and shattered computer stripped away, but also his limbs. His neck and torso are clotted black and purple, stiff from rigor mortis. Rushing over, True tangles his feet in other bodies. Pulls himself free. Makes his way over, tripping, slipping.

Mug holds out his hand.

True, caught off guard, reaches into his pocket for his emergency wad of bills secreted away. Gone. Pickpocketed. True holds out his hands as if checking for rain. “I don’t have anything.”

Mug insists. “Baksheesh.”

Pidge weighs in. “Baksheesh. Ha ha. Baksheesh.”

Mug points to the wrist-top. True covers it up. Indicates True’s shoes. “No.” Fingers True’s shirt. True taps his socks. OK. Takes off his shoes and hands his socks over to Mug, who pockets them and saunters back to his bench.

After kneeling down, True secretly scans Aslam with his wrist-top, videos the head, neck and torso, takes an atmospheric sample so the computer can compare atmospheric contributions to Aslam’s chemical state, holds the wrist-top to the gash in Aslam’s neck. Through the hologram playing in front of him, invisible to others, True sees Mug sipping from a thermos, Pidge spitting streams of betel nut juice and narc root into a corner while counting dollars. His dollars, True presumes.

He turns Aslam over and scans his back, flips him back and caresses his head, brushing ringlets of hair from his eyes.

“Forgive me, Aslam.” True reaches into his pocket and pulls out a few commemorative coins:
The People’s Revolution for Justice and Purity
. All the money he has left. Digs the coin into Aslam’s neck, extracts a tiny chunk of bomb-resistant fabric and blood, wipes the blood on the inside flap of his pocket, and hides the metallic fabric in his coat. True can scarcely see through his own tear-filled eyes. Wonders what Aslam would say if he could see this. He wants to open Aslam’s eyes one last time, wants to see inside his soul, but someone stole his eyeballs.

He kisses Aslam’s cheek. Another electric crackling, a brief blackout. The door opens and more naked corpses are tossed inside, one at a time, onto the messy piles of death.

The game show is zapped away, replaced by a commercial for a home chemotherapy kit. Mug, unhappy with the additional work, runs his hand through his hair and down the back of his neck. But wordlessly creaks open the furnace door and shoves bodies inside.

CHAPTER 3

True’s walking through Snake Alley, the central artery of his local mall, a cluster of grouchy stores stocking home remedies, food, and oils derived from rattlesnakes; financed with Japanese money, erected after a tenuous peace was reached between Luzonia and its neighbors.

He traverses this mall practically every day, the only safe pedestrian route out of his neighborhood. Other routes lead through the surrounding shanties, with their tin and plastic box-houses crammed together, suffocating the hills on which they are tenuously anchored. A murky river serves as the sole source of water, and all along this river, locals drink, bathe, and wash dishes in factory effluvium.

True leaves the din of the mall for the din of a game arcade, washed into overlapping explosions and searing bubbles of lights. Women, a few men, are plugged into virtual reality machines, interacting with established soap opera actors and starring as queen bitch guest stars, battling holograms in hand-to-hand, severing the spines of medieval warriors, decapitating Roman gladiators, taking aim as guerilla snipers in jungle warfare, living out sexual fantasies in fantastical worlds. He heads to the back.

Sitting behind a coffee bar counter, framed by a dazzling display of lottery tickets, is a woman perched on a stool, counting loose money. Her eyes are the color of
dhal
, her hair imprisoned in a messy ponytail. True leans over the bar. She’s built like a Greek statue that’s fallen victim to vandals.

“Hey!” Her harsh-bud voice is muffled by a dangling cigarette yet carries easily over the arcade noise. “What do you want today?”

“Coffee.” True takes a stool. “Since when does Pinatubo work the counter?”

“Like, Piña runs her business hands-on? Besides, three girls in for cancer treatments. Fucking melanoma? Fourth time this year.”

“And Piña?”

“No problem.” Raps on the counter with her knuckles. “Know why?”

“No.”

“Piña stays inside and works out.” She flexes biceps, squeezes her arms until veins pop blue and ridges of muscle ride up her forearms. A butterfly-shaped tricep asserts itself when she straightens her arms. Shy pride. “These days, girl’s gotta work out.”

True reruns his amazement every time he sees Piña. Her angelic face, olive skin, worsted hair that, when she allows it, cascades to her shoulders, superimposed over iron—etched with scars, painted with tattoos, pierced with rings and studs. But it’s not just her tree trunk torso, thick wrists and forearms, breasts layered over tiled muscle (they almost seem an afterthought), and that she achieved this without steroids or synthetic muscle surgery. It is that she has no legs.

Piña spins, plants coffee in a microzap, and seconds after hands True a cup, steam wisping into air-conned air. He blows on the coffee, sips; the sting makes him feel alive.

Piña massages her bicep. “Piña heard you down at the cops.”

“I had a little problem.”

“No. A little problem’s when you gotta go in for a melanoma treatment and there’s no one around to watch your shit. Or you come down with AIDS and gotta pay a fuckload for black market drugs. When you gotta deal with the cops, that’s more than a little problem.”