Year Zero (28 page)

After some awkward introductions, the conversation turned to Phluttr itself, which Manda described as diseased and (worse) derivative, since “it’s just a wad of used chewing gum sticking some other services together.” Pugwash retorted that this made it a
mashup
—a far higher form of creativity than any of the simpleminded services that “sit beneath it.” He followed this up with some muddled thoughts about the work of mashup DJ’s like Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Manda had some insights on this, being a critically acclaimed musician and all. Pugwash rejected her points categorically, then declared that social media and the “Semantic Web” were “resuscitating” modern music by “re-imagining” and “repurposing” it.

Manda said that social media was becoming a cancer, with Exhibit A being GawkStalker.com—a site where hordes of wannabe paparazzi publish cellphone photos that they sneak of even the most obscure stars, including hundreds of pictures of her. Pugwash mentioned that he was an investor
in GawkStalker. Manda said he should consider marketing it to the thought police in Pyongyang. Pugwash critiqued her pronunciation of Pyongyang, and then enunciated it slowly, sounding like a white guy impersonating an Egyptian trying to speak Korean. And so on. I’d kept the two of them from crossing paths since then. But there was no avoiding that tonight.

Or was there? As I opened the taxi door, a loud, shattering sound came from the top floor of the neighboring building. I leapt from the cab, gazed upward, and saw something large and Pugwash-shaped accelerating toward the ground. It landed with a sickening thud about eight feet away. It was my cousin’s battered and bloodied corpse.

Manda was just getting out
on her side of the cab when Pugwash splatted, and saw nothing. The driver was denouncing the Algonquian tribe to me (they apparently fought against us in the French and Indian War), so he was facing my way, and saw everything. Already plenty rattled, that was it for him, and he took off—saving us a hefty $13.40 fare (plus tip!).

As the cab lurched forward, Meowhaus made a frantic leap through Manda’s door to the sopping street. From there, neither rain, nor sleet, nor cadaver was going to deflect him from the shortest possible path to the nearest awning. This meant a soggy, furry cannonball shot right through Pugwash’s remains. Yes—
through
. Afraid that he’d blasted a little canyon through my dead cousin (or perhaps left a wake), I edged toward the corpse. But there was no sign of Meowhaus’s passage. Nor was there any trace of
moisture on Pugwash, other than blood. His hair was oddly unaffected by the torrential rain, and his clothes looked bone dry.

Suddenly Manda was clutching my arm like a tourniquet. “Oh my
God
,” she whispered. It really was a gruesome sight. And it didn’t help that hundreds of tiny worms were already crawling out of Pugwash’s mouth. Worse, he was starting to decompose. His flesh rotted before our eyes, revealing a seething mass of maggots feasting on his internal organs. They all died after just a few chomps, and turned right into dust—along with his remaining innards. This left only his skeleton, which looked like it had spent years bleaching under the Kalahari sun. Within moments, it collapsed and joined the dust pile, which then spun into a tornado pattern that rocketed up six stories, and right into Pugwash’s open window.

Somewhere between the worms and the dust storm, we both realized that it had to be some kind of trick. Having seen countless low-tech versions of this sort of thing as a kid, I transitioned smoothly from shocked grief to a clinical appreciation for the creativity and attention to detail that had gone into it. But Manda’s from a civilized family that doesn’t rank faked deaths alongside whoopee cushions in the pantheon of harmless childhood larks. Badly upset by the gory scene, she flew into a righteous fury when she realized that someone—let’s call him “Pugwash”—was just messing with us. “Son of a
bitch
,” she whispered, staring hard at something. I followed her gaze and saw that a trio of mirrors had been arrayed a few feet from the building’s front door—fragile antiques that were unlikely to survive the rainstorm. “Self-organizing light,” she hissed, jabbing a finger at them.

“Huh?”

She pointed up at the window that the dust devil had vanished into. “I’m sure he pointed a stereopticon at those mirrors. They must have helped him bounce that sickening scene down here.”

“Ah. That would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?”

“The
jackass
!”

Pugwash lives on the top floor of a six-story building in a decadently spacious loft. Entering it is like walking into a scrapbook. His every phase, voyage, and achievement is commemorated—by furniture,
¹
carpets,
²
framed certificates under museum-quality glass, poster-sized photo prints,
³
and bulky conversation pieces. This last category of
objet
includes a four-man Harvard racing shell that hangs from a living room wall and dominates the space. From this, the casual visitor might suppose that he rowed at … well, at Harvard. Rather than at the small Schenectady college where he splashed and whined his way through one semester of intramural crew (and where the boats must be in hot demand from collectors, given that he had to settle for the Harvard one).

Pugwash curates items for his little museum on the basis of their potential to up the odds—however slightly—of a female visitor dropping her panties. And I respect this objective.
But he’d have more luck if he’d just cut the propaganda campaign, and give his apartment some breathing room to work its own inherent charm. His living room ceiling arches dramatically, soaring from about ten feet at the front door to well over twenty at the far wall, which is all glass. And while he doesn’t have an unobstructed panoramic view, I think he looks out on something much better—a sawtooth jumble of buildings, rooftops, and water towers that’s as distinctively New York as the Statue of Liberty, and as varied and unpredictable as the city itself. It really is dazzling. But walk in there, and all you see is that damned Harvard boat.

Unless you’re Manda. She missed the boat. She missed the view. She missed the sixteenth-century maps, the vintage Sinatra records, the first-edition Vonnegut novels, the signed Picasso print, and even the huge yellow parrot who snarled “who’s da dame?” when she burst in. She ignored everything but my cousin, whose idea of an appropriate use of alien technology was faking his death for two people who had just raced across town out of concern
for him
, for Pugwash; who repaid their concern with that gory simulated homicide or was it a suicide well whatever it was he followed it up with special effects that would sicken a horror movie fanatic and did he even consider what they would have done to the psyche of a small child if one happened to be there?

Pugwash was about to respond when a panicked flurry of yellow feathers landed on his head. “Hey, don’t mess with my bodyguard,” Paulie hollered, sinking his talons into my cousin’s skull. “He knows kung fu!” At that, Pugwash jumped sideways, trying to dodge Meowhaus, who was rocketing straight for his groin. But he jumped too late. Already off balance at the moment of impact, Pugwash was toppled by
the collision. Badly spooked, he leapt right back to his feet. This was good news for Paulie, whose aerie on Pugwash’s scalp ended up safely beyond Meowhaus’s reach. But it enraged Meowhaus, who reared up on his hind legs and sank his front claws deep into Pugwash’s thighs, fixating on his prey like a dog treeing a squirrel.

“Aright, enough adat, jeez,” Paulie said, flapping off to the top of a bookcase made from rare Burmese hardwoods. “Someone tell Simba to back th’ hell down.”

“Come here, Meowhaus,” Manda called. He instantly ceased hostilities and trotted right to her side, more like a border collie with marine training than a feral cat who’d had a day to learn his name.

Paulie quickly composed himself and turned to Manda. “What’s your name, little girl?” he asked smarmily.

“I’m Manda. And you?”

“You can cawl me Paulie.”

“Well, it’s good to meet you, Polly. I’d offer a cracker, but I’m fresh out.”

“
No
, not that. It’s P
auuu
lie.” He sounded like he was spoofing the Brooklyn word for “cawfee.”

“Like I said. Polly.”

“Pauuuuulie!”

“Paulie’s a trade envoy from a distant galaxy,” Pugwash announced. His nasal voice told me that he’d caught my cold, just as expected.

“We’ve met,” I said.

“Oh—I know.”

Paulie drew closer by fluttering to a rosewood side table which (as my cousin loves to trumpet) was briefly owned by the vice president of Belize. “Good to see you again, Your Illustriousness,” he said to me, sarcastically overenunciating
the title that Carly had used to address the Guardian. He started into a deep bow, then stopped abruptly. “Oh, wait—that ain’t really yer title, is it?”

I was suddenly as dizzy as I’d been in that plummeting omnicab on Zinkiwu. Paulie had already figured out that I wasn’t a Guardian. The Earth was doomed.

“Anyways,” he continued, “I’d love to stay and yap. But my Wrinkle outta here’s finally about to open. So, see ya.”

“Hey, when can we get something signed?” Pugwash gurgled urgently through his congested nose. “We need to get that business incorporated, pronto.”

“I’ll, uh, have my people draw somethin’ up,” Paulie muttered.

“Meanwhile I can keep the prototype, right?” Pugwash asked, holding up a stereopticon.

“ ’Fraid not,” Paulie said. “That’d be against interplanetary, uh, trade rules. So why doncha set it down here. Yer gonna have millions a them things soon.”

Pugwash reluctantly put the stereopticon on the end table next to Paulie. It turned into a translucent puddle that flowed up his feathers and formed into a nautical-themed pashmina afghan (his answer to Manda’s chunky necklace and Carly’s crucifix, apparently). Moments later, both Paulie and the transformed stereopticon vanished.

Pugwash turned to me. “You’re quite the con artist.” He didn’t say this judgmentally, but with professional respect.

“Me?”

“No, I’m talking to the cat.”

“Gggggggggh!”

Pugwash turned to Manda. “Nick convinced Paulie that he was our Trade Regent to Asia. As if there’s any such thing.”

“I
what
?”

He kept addressing Manda. “Paulie’s looking for a business partner, so he was here doing a reference check.” He turned to me. “Quite the childhood you invented for yourself.”

“You told him about my childhood.” I now understood why Paulie had dropped in on Pugwash. At Eatiary, he must have guessed that we were related somehow. And he knew that any humanoid Guardian coming to Earth with the so-called trespassers right before the Townshend Line went up in the seventies would have been an adult. So he just needed to hear a couple of stories about me running around as a tot in the eighties to verify that I was nothing but a harmless Earthling—and he figured Pugwash would cough that up readily if we were in fact related. Particularly if he was bought off with the prospects of earning a quick fortune in intergalactic import-export.

“Nick told Paulie that he was raised from infancy in a Swiss boarding school for future Trade Regents,” Pugwash chuckled to Manda. “As if.” He turned back to me. “Paulie didn’t know whether to believe this. So he asked me to show him some old family photo albums, and I’m afraid I did. I would have backed you up if you’d brought me in on the deal. But you wanted to keep it all to yourself, didn’t you?”

“
What
deal?”

Pugwash turned back to Manda. “Paulie’s gonna export these projectors to Earth. You saw what they can do. And I’m sorry that the test pissed you off. But I wanted to see how well they could work outside, and Paulie said I’d need some mirrors relaying the light down there. Then we decided
to have some fun with it when Nick texted that he was coming over. I’ll bet my mirrors are ruined, huh?”

“Yeah, they’re kind of shot,” she said.
Along with humanity’s future
.

“Too bad. Anyway, the projector’s the first product Paulie’s bringing to Earth. But he has exclusive rights for
all
trade to the planet for the next fifteen years, and he needs to work with someone here. And, well,” Pugwash turned to me. “Sorry, but he was pretty upset about you faking your résumé.”

“So let me guess—he’ll be working with you instead?” As I had figured, it was no coincidence that Paulie had booked his shipment to Earth right after Pugwash texted me that the two of them had become buddies. And given that he knew the truth about me when he did this, it was no doubt a payload of metallicam, a half day before we expected it.

“He’s gonna do more than just work with me. He’s making me his
part
ner.” Pugwash turned back to Manda. “An alien Peace Armada is planning a big White House landing in just a few weeks. They’ll mainly be opening diplomatic channels. But Paulie’s sponsoring it, so he has a few minutes in the program to demo the projector. Talk about product placement! It’ll be the biggest event in human history. And, uh,” he edged a bit closer to her. “I can get you great seats.”

I sighed. On top of everything else, Pugwash was now waging a ham-fisted campaign to get into Manda’s pants. He wouldn’t act this way if he knew I was crazy about her—because while I’ve probably made it hard to believe, he’s kind of a decent guy. Of course, my feelings for Manda should have been clear to him. But Pugwash tends to view other people as being charismatic androids who exist primarily
to shuffle opportunities and obstacles in and out of his life. So he tends to miss obvious signals, and is prone to being a major jerk by accident.

It took about fifteen minutes to get the truth about the aliens across to him. This should have gone faster, given that he’s way too bright to be gulled by something as improbable as that nonsense about me pretending to be a “Trade Regent.” But when sinister parrots materialize in our apartments bearing mind-blowing alien technologies, it’s not unreasonable to accept whatever they say after they’ve laid out their initial bona fides. The fact that Pugwash was highly disposed to embrace everything that Paulie told him made him all the readier to drink the Kool-Aid. And when Manda and I finally laid out the truth, it was emotionally wrenching for him to let go of the trade monopoly that he briefly thought he held with the rest of the universe, and the journey from denial to acceptance took some time.