"Marching the Hate Machines Into the Sun"
Surface Evolution #1
First one from 2007 here, folks. Roughly 5K. The title was taken from the Thievery Corporation song of the same name.
Cheers!
Æ
MARCHING THE HATE MACHINES INTO THE SUN
My wife says: “Come on, Cam, we’ll be late.”
I say, “What’s the damn rush? Fashionably late and all that, right?” Fiddle with my tie. My socks droop around my ankles under my suit pants. Not tight enough. Can’t stand that feeling. Never could.
My wife, you don’t need to know her name, she says, “Not to this party. Can’t be late. You know how these people are.” Straightens folds in her thin black dress, smooths down wrinkles. Presses her lips together in the bathroom mirror, evening out glossy, dark red lipstick.
These people, she says.
These people are rich. These people are wealthy beyond compare. These are our kind of people.
When our limo arrives, we’re still in the house, fussing about with our clothes. I lean out the window, call to our driver (can’t remember his name) to wait, we’ll be down in a few minutes.
The driver nods, leans against the limo, lights a smoke.
My wife stands in the bedroom doorway, head cocked to one side. Impatient.
In my rush, I wrench my tie up too tight around my throat. Choke for a second, loosen it. Shake my head side to side, trying to get comfortable inside the stiff Bloomingdale’s shirt.
“Come on, come on,” she says.
“Yes, I’m coming, I’m coming. Christ.”
She says nothing, just walks down the spiral staircase. The front door opens, slams shut. High heels crunch gravel. I hear her talking to the limo driver. Her sibilants drift up to me through the bedroom window.
Hike my socks up, put on my shoes. Halfway down the staircase, the socks start to pool again.
The limo driver sees me emerge through the front door, drops his cigarette, mashes it underfoot. I slip in the backseat next to my wife.
“Are we going to have fun tonight, dear?”
“We’re going to have a great time tonight, darling.”
I can’t remember who says which sentence.
*
Jeremy Hapstead rattles on about his golf game. Whiskey sloshes around in his glass as he speaks. I nod appropriately. When he’s finished impressing me, he wanders off, corners someone else. Whiskey sloshes around some more, this time flying out over the edges, dripping on the plush carpeting. The man Jeremy’s trying to impress wears the same disinterested expression I wore moments ago. But Jeremy doesn’t care. He only needs to feel as though he’s doing his best to impress. He is a Hapstead, after all.
I don’t even know whose house we’re at, only that it’s a very large and well-decorated house. Some rock star or actor or politician.
I see my wife across the room. She’s talking to someone who might be the president of some country or other. Never was very good at remembering faces.
She swishes the wine in her glass around and around. Always counterclockwise. A nervous habit, and one which I find distinctly irritating. She laughs at something President Whatever says. Tilts her head back and everything.
My socks have pooled completely around my ankles again. I want to scream. Instead, I walk over to the bartender, ask for a bottle of his best imported beer. He hands me a brand I’m unfamiliar with.
“Such a fine evening tonight,” he says.
“Thank Christ for air conditioning,” I say, tip back my bottle and drain half of it in one go.
“Outside, I mean.” The bartender points toward the balcony. Silky, thin blue curtains blow inward gently.
I nod slightly, wander away toward the open doors leading out onto the balcony. I do not leave a tip.
Earlier in the day it’d been unbearably humid to the point where it felt like I was breathing through wet cheesecloth. But now, as I step outside, the air is just this side of crisp. I frown, button up my jacket.
It’s a large balcony, so I pass a lot of people as I make my way through the crowd. People I recognize: judges, lawyers, religious leaders, politicians, famous actors, infamous musicians, crime bosses, police chiefs, corporate CEOs. The ones who make the world go around. Mixed with these are faces I don’t recognize. They seem incredibly out of place, like someone just stuffed them into a nice suit and told them to smile and keep their mouths shut. Nervous. Unsure why they’re in attendance at such a high-class event.
I wink at a couple of these out-of-placers. This tiny gesture says: I know your secret, friend. And it’s okay; it’s safe with me. You’re someone’s friend. Someone important. Nothing to be ashamed of.
I take a quick look behind me. See that my wife is no longer talking to President Whatever. I scan the crowd, but don’t see her anywhere.
A gust of wind sweeps through the crowd. Women clutch at their purses, hold down their skirts: a balcony full of Marilyn Monroes. Men clutch their drinks to their chests, put hands up to their heads to protect their hairdos. People start heading indoors to get out of the wind.
I get to the end of the balcony, rest my beer bottle on the ornate granite railing. Look down. Tiny, tiny specks bustling about in the dark. Bumper-to-bumper traffic, even at this time of night. I wonder how many of those specks would kill to be invited to this party.
Take another swig. Look up. Squint to see a bunch of pinholes in the fabric of night. Moving away very, very slowly—nearly imperceptible. Squint harder, concentrate. What the hell are those? Can’t be stars. Another swig, drain the bottle, tip it all the way up, getting every last drop of foam.
Forget about the pinholes.
Place the bottle on the railing again, turn to head back inside. Party seems to be thinning out. I glance at my watch, frown. It’s early yet.
“Cameron! Yo, Cam!”
I glance about. Teeth flash, mouths open and close with fake laughter, eyes bulge too far out of their sockets. Feet shuffle, side to side, impatient. Expectant.
My name again. Go up on tiptoes to peer over everyone’s heads, can’t spot the speaker. Join the shufflers trying to get back indoors. Another gust of wind slices through the crowd.
“Cam! Jeez, man, wait up, would ya?” A firm hand drops onto my left shoulder. Grips it there. Too tight.
I pull my shoulder out of the man’s hand, immediately irritated. Step back.
“Didn’t ya hear me?” the guy says. He’s all shark grin, stiff hair, and Armani.
“Going to get another drink, fella.” I lift my empty bottle. “Do I know you or something?”
“Ha!” the guy says, claps me on the back. I have a brief, intense vision of my fist ramming into his perfect chompers, blood running down his chin. And him still with his idiotic grin. “Good one, Cam. Good one. Say, look—”
“No time for looking, guy, sorry. Need to refill.” I turn away.
Again, he clamps a hand on my shoulder. “You really don’t recognize me? Jordan. From IBM. Remember?”
I shrug out of his grip, my voice hard as brick. “No fucking idea who you are. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
When I get back indoors, I pull up a stool at the bar. Despite the breeze, the air inside is stuffy.
“Party’s clearing out fast, huh?” the bartender says, one towel-wrapped hand inside a beer glass, wiping, wiping.
“Yeah,” I say. “Night’s still young and all that.”
I twist around in my stool, glance about quickly for my new best buddy, Jordan, but he’s nowhere in sight.
“Another beer, sir?”
“Yeah, same kind.”
He pops the cap, hands it to me.
In my peripheral vision, I see several waiters scurrying around. I turn to see what the big event is that requires so many of them. But I catch only flitting glimpses of the waiters’ activity through the crowd, like in one of those flip-books where the action moves one frame ahead for each page you turn. I’m skipping pages, though, and no matter which way I lean, I can’t get a clear view.
Gulp down half the new bottle. Wonder distractedly where my wife went, surprising even myself with my level of apathy toward her.
My vision swims when I turn my head to face the bartender. There are suddenly four of him, crisscrossing one another. I blink my eyes, rub the back of one hand across them. Blink some more. Down to three bartenders, but still two too many.
I turn around for a moment, look behind me; the room is getting more and more empty every time I look at it. Only a handful of partiers left in the room now. Swing my head in the general direction of the balcony: completely empty. Only the billowing curtain showing any sign of movement.
And my wife is nowhere in the room.
My wife. I try to make the words mean more by saying them again in my head.
“You alright, buddy?” the bartender says. Him and that fucking beer glass, wipe, wipe, wipe, and I want to smash it, jam the shards into his throat.
“Yeah . . . I’m fine, I’m fine. Buddy,” I say, and sneer. The corner of my lip lifts impossibly high, Elvis-high, and at that moment I’m not sure it’ll ever come back down.
“You sure don’t look it, chum.” Wipe, wipe. Smash, smash.
“Look, mind your own goddamn—” I teeter on my stool, sweat dripping down the sides of my face. “—business, ya skinny little . . .”
I fall directly sideways, floor coming fast. Then hands grip me tight, lift me back vertical.
My head is a steam press. I imagine smoke billowing from my ears. My skull feels like crushed ice.
“Easy there, Cam. You alright?”
Jordan—Mr. Armani, Mr. IBM, Mr. SharkTeeth—has his grubby mitts on me. “Not you again,” I slur. “What’s your fucking deal, guy? Christ.”
Every word from my mouth sounds drenched in syrup, a sporadic stream of out-of-sync letters falling like stones, thumping on the carpet.
“Sorry about earlier, okay? Mistaken identity,” Jordan says. “Thought you were someone else. You’re Cameron Jacobs; I thought you were Cameron Jacobbs—two Bs. No worries,” he says, pats me on the back twice, releases his grip, walks away quickly.
I fall forward onto the bar countertop.
Lights out.
*
When I come to, my hands are tied behind my back and my head is a thick, fuzzy sock filled with marshmallows.
I’m seated in front of a wall of small televisions. A black-and-white surveillance video plays on all the screens. The only difference between them is that they’re each showing a different angle. But they all show the two rooms I was just in: the one with the bartender, and the balcony.
Hurts to twist my neck side to side, so I angle my head back a little bit, try to see behind me. Only darkness there, though I hear breathing. Two sets of lungs.
“Hey, uh . . .” I croak. “Could I, like, get a glass of water or something? Christ.”
No answer.
On the video, a man—my good pal Jordan, by the looks of it—flits around the party clapping people on the back, smiling, teeth like tombstones, even on the small, grainy screens. People drink and drink, then they fall over. Drop like flies. I realize I’m watching a slightly sped-up playback of about half an hour ago. And here comes me, slithering to the bar, then out onto the balcony. Back in again, over to the bar. Jordan saves me from a face-to-carpet meeting, then I slump over forward on the countertop. Some waiter lifts me up by the armpits, drags me away, out of the shot.
The video screen switches to snow, then starts again from the beginning of the party.
“Is that everyone?” someone behind me says. A man.
“Think so.” A beat. “Should be,” says the other set of lungs. A female pair.
“What about this one?” A boot kicks the back of my metal chair.
“Take him home, I guess. Wrong guy. What else can we do?”
“Fuck it. Let’s put him on a plane, too. No one’d know. And it ain’t like he’s some shining example of the species.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Every seat is already assigned on every ship. At least for the next few waves. Now just backup the tape and let’s go. Come on, hurry it up. We’ve got less than twenty-five minutes to rendezvous.”
Noises of quick but measured movement: bags zipping up, laptops clicking shut, plugs pulled from walls, metal chairs folding, a door opening. Light from the hallway cuts the interior swatch of darkness like scissors, momentarily blinding me.
“So, no water, huh?” I say, my eyes scrunched tight.
“No. Not right now. There’s some in the van,” the woman says.
I nod, move my pasty tongue around in my mouth, making dry clicking noises. “Fantastic.”
The man behind me hoists my inert body from the chair. Only my mouth and brain seem to be working properly.
Into an elevator. Doors close, down we go. Doors open.
Someone’s cell phone rings. I hear its owner flip it open. What I gather from the one-sided conversation is that the proper Cameron Jacobbs—two Bs—has been found, and everyone has been “loaded in,” whatever that means. And that these two charming persons currently dragging me by my armpits along a cracked chunk of pavement outside this high-rise’s lobby are needed ASAP—no time to drop off the other Cameron.
The last words I hear before I drift off again are: “Waves two and three launched. Preparing to launch wave four.”
*
My brain reboots one more time and now some hatchet-faced fucker is dousing my head with cold water. I inhale sharply. He moves the lip of the bottle to my mouth, tips it back. I gulp greedily.
The front of my shirt soaked, water dribbling off my chin, and the rope tying my hands together digging deep into my wrists, I blink my watering eyes at my surroundings. I’m in the back of a van. It’s dark except for little blinking lights coming from row upon row of electronics on shelves stacked floor-to-ceiling on both sides. Again, I’m seated in a metal chair between the stacks, facing the back doors.
Crouched low to avoid braining himself on the ceiling, Hatchet Face steps behind me, moves to the passenger seat at the front, says something to the driver I can’t quite make out.
We bounce over pothole after pothole. Definitely not in the city anymore. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I look out the two small windows in the van’s double doors: pitch, except for the slight red haze of the van’s running lights.
I clear my throat, wish desperately I could wipe my sandpapery eyes. “Cameron Jacobbs,” I say.
Hatchet Face’s gravelly voice barely cuts through the noise of the truck: “You say something?”
“Cameron Jacobbs. The other Cameron. What did he do? What do you want with him?”
Silence.
We ram into a monster pothole and I bounce up off the chair, fall sideways, slam my head into a piece of electronic equipment peppered across its face with small knobs and buttons. I feel blood on my teeth.
I wind up on the van’s floor, crammed between the chair and the wall of equipment.
No one moves to help me.
*
I slip in and out of consciousness for awhile. Then Hatchet Face and the driver of the van—a frail-looking twig of a woman in her forties with a soiled do-rag on her head—stop the vehicle, drag me out the back doors by my feet.
Twiggy cuts the rope tying my hands together. Hatchet Face pushes me from behind, tells me to walk. I wring my wrists with my hands, trying to get feeling back. I look around, see that we’re in the middle of a desert.
My eyes clear up a little with the dry air; I wipe them on my sleeve. Blink the last of the grittiness out. Up ahead: lights. Fiercely bright. Some winking, some pulsating. The sound of massive engines as we get closer. Looking left to right across the horizon, I see a row of launching pads similar to the ones that used to be at Cape Canaveral, before NASA was forced to shut down. Probably ten or twelve of them.
Shuttles lined up, aimed at the sky. Not as wide and bulky as the old shuttles, though—the ones I used to watch on TV when I was a kid. These are longer, sleeker. Shinier. Other shuttles are on their sides away from the launching pads. Teams of workers move about. Sparks fly from blowtorches scorching metal.
I nod toward the ones aimed at the sky, turn my head around to call over my shoulder, “Where they going?”
“Up,” Twiggy says, tells me to turn around, keep walking.
Few more feet and we hit pavement. Armoured trucks coast by. Diesel fumes cough out. Enormous tented facility to our left. People in uniforms I don’t recognize drift in and out. One of Hatchet Face’s frying-pan-sized mitts slams into my back, pushing me in the tent’s direction.
I gawk up at the closest shuttle, watch people move about on its scaffolding. Beetles scurrying over a biscuit. I’m reminded of the party, looking down at all the people bustling below. I realize I’ve never bustled for anything in my life.
We walk through the tent’s flap. Inside, more bustling, but at least the scale isn’t dizzying.
People brush by me, eyes straight ahead, purposeful. I glance behind me: Hatchet Face and Twiggy are still in tow. Twiggy’s knife by her side, fist clenching it tight.
At the back of the tent, a short, overweight woman with dark, shoulder-length hair, and John Lennon glasses waddles around in the same unfamiliar uniform everyone else is wearing. Glance behind me, see Hatchet Face nod toward this woman.
She’s got charts, maps, and other papers scattered all over a desk in front of her. She shuffles through the papers, wheezing like she just climbed several flights of stairs.
“The other Cameron Jacobs,” Twiggy says, motions for me to sit. Again, it’s a metal chair.
Dark roast coffee wafts up my nose. I look at Lennon’s cup staining some of the maps on the desk. Perhaps my eyes widen a little or I lick my lips because Lennon says, “Conklin, get Mr. Jacobs a coffee.”
Hatchet Face wanders off.
“Thanks,” I say.
Lennon moves to the other side of the desk, flips through some papers there. She does not tell me I’m welcome.
“Those glasses don’t really suit you,” I say, unsure what prompts me to speak at all.
Lennon looks up at me, smiles, says, “Your suit is too tight.”
I smile in return.
Hatchet Face arrives with my coffee.
The moment passes like sun glinting off chrome.
“Now, before you start asking a million questions, Mr. Jacobs, I shall inform you quite seriously that I’m shadowy and cryptic and all that, and you won’t glean anything of importance from what I tell you.”
“Good. I would expect nothing less of a criminal mastermind,” I say.
“Is that what you think I am?” she says, picks up her coffee, sips, places it back precisely on the ring it had previously left on the chart paper.
“Well, by your own admittance you’re shadowy and cryptic. Plus, you have a bunch of space shuttles lined up and ready to launch God-knows-what into space for some presumably dastardly purpose.”
“Dastardly, you think?”
“I do.”
“Shall I show you what I’m launching into space, then?”
Lennon moves to a small monitor, flips a switch. The screen flickers to life.
“Will you have to kill me if you show me?” I ask, not really enjoying this silly banter as much as I thought I might.
“No, no need to kill you, Mr. Jacobs. You’ll read all about it in tomorrow’s newspapers, anyway. And the day after that, and the day after that, too. I suspect what I’m doing will be newsworthy for quite some time to come.”
Outside: the whine of airplane engines. Rubber screaming on pavement.
Inside: the monitor shows where the party in the high-rise moved to. But no one seems in a partying mood anymore. Strapped to narrow seats. Row upon row of them. The view is from the back of one of the shuttle’s compartments. Important people. Incredibly important. But again, shot through with nobodies. Some I’ve winked at, some I haven’t.
“Wave four?” I venture.
“Wave four,” Lennon confirms.
One of the women in the seats nearer the front turns her head enough so that I see her profile.
I point to the monitor. “That’s my wife.”
Lennon says nothing. Sips her coffee, asks Hatchet Face for a refill.
It occurs to me to ask that Lennon release her, give me my wife back. Demand to know what this is all about, who she thinks she is, kidnapping people, sending them up into space for whatever insane purpose she has in mind.
“I’d say I’m sorry, Mr. Jacobs, but I’m not. Your wife deserves to be on that shuttle.”
I look down at a crease in my suit pants, pick at some fluff there. The pants are so tight, I can’t pick at the fluff without pinching my skin.
“Do you want to know what she did?”
“No,” I say. The word is out of my mouth before I even realize I want to say it.
Lennon shrugs her shoulders, goes back to shuffling papers, barking orders to uniformed people in her vicinity.
A sudden wave of tiredness drops my shoulders. The only thing of relative importance I can think of to ask is: “Where are they going?”
“Up,” Lennon says. “But you already knew that, didn’t you.”
“Just into space?” I ask, look up at her. Her eyes are soft, caring. “You don’t seem the type to just launch people into space. If you don’t mind me saying.”
My chest feels like a stone weight, sinking me deeper into the chair. Something like tears wet my eyelids.
“I’m not just launching them into space, Mr. Jacobs. But I do appreciate your kind words about my character.” She leans against the desk, one arm across her chest, one fingering the handle of her coffee cup. No nail polish. I glance up to her face. No makeup, either.
Forgettable.
She tilts her head to one side. “Aren’t you going to ask how I did this? Don’t you want to know who I am?”
“I thought you were shadowy and cryptic.”
“I am. Very much so, but now that the operation’s underway, there’s no point in being so silly. I’m fairly certain I can’t be stopped.” She smirks, pleased with her cartoonish declaration.
“Ah,” I say, rapidly losing interest.
“What’s more invisible than a short, middle-aged, overweight woman, Mr. Jacobs?”
I shrug.
“Nothing. Nothing at all,” she says. There is pride and sadness in her voice at the same time.
I nod, glance at the monitor. My wife is squirming in her seat. I can’t be sure because the camera’s too far away for clarity, but I think she’s crying.
“And you’ve got a few bucks, too, I’d venture to say.”
“A few, yes. More than a lot of people. But most of the money came from investors.”
Another airplane lands outside. Passengers for the next couple of waves, I assume.
I look around me, watch everyone hurry about, seeing to their assigned tasks. They do not look mad. They do not look particularly concerned with their lack of sanity at all.
“I decided, with some input from my backers, who would go, and why: which politicians, which leaders of religion, which terrorists, which greed-driven CEOs. The hate-machines of the world. There was a period, early on in the project—this was probably a decade ago now—when I wasn’t sure I’d get enough support,” Lennon says, her confession sounding scripted. “Or that it would be impossible to pull off, that the timing would be too hard to coordinate, but you’d be surprised at how easy—”
“Can I go on the next wave?”
Lennon stops talking. Stares at me. “Pardon?”
“The next wave of shuttles. Can I be on one of them?”
On the monitor, more than just my wife is squirming in her seat now. There are eleven more monitors, but they’re turned off, so I can’t see the other shuttles full of people squirming, crying, begging for their lives. But it’s comforting enough to know that they’re there.
“They . . .” she says, appears to be choosing her words carefully. “They won’t be coming back, Mr. Jacobs.”
I think about this for a moment. Of course I know this, but hearing the words said out loud makes it more real.
“I know,” I say. “I don’t want to come back.”
Lennon looks at Hatchet Face and Twiggy. I keep my gaze locked on hers.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Jacobs,” she says, clearly uncomfortable with having to go off script, with being forced to stray from her well-thought-out confession. “You’re not on the list.”
The weight in my chest sinks me farther into the chair. The wetness in my eyes that resembles tears comes a little harder now. I’m unsure what I’m doing, but if I’m crying, it’s a completely different experience than I remember it to be. For a moment, I allow myself the delusion that these tears are for my wife, that I actually loved her, and that she loved me, but that we’d just somehow forgotten.
Disappointed that I’d cut her off, Lennon turns away and appears to be sulking.
“Please?” I say, desperation creeping around the edges of my voice. My body feels hot, burning up from the inside. “My suits feel like a second skin, always too tight. My skin itself feels like a second skin. Never my own.”
I look at the monitor again, imagine that my wife has turned fully around in her seat and is mouthing my name, motioning with her hand for me to come aboard.
“Can’t you just put me—”
“Your name is not on the list, Mr. Jacobs.”
And just like that, I am as invisible to her as she is to the world.
She instructs Hatchet Face and Twiggy to take me home, then gathers some papers from the desk—knocking others off in her impatience, sending them fluttering to the floor—and briskly walks away.
I wipe a sleeve across my eyes, look at the wetness, touch it with a fingertip.
“Come on,” Hatchet Face says, wrenches me out of the chair, pushes me toward the tent flap.
Outside, handcuffed people get off airplanes, spill out of vans, panic in their eyes, sweat dripping down their faces. They see the shuttles and they try to get away, scramble in the desert dirt. Their captors do not harm them, only pull them back up to their feet, march them forward.
The sun has just topped the horizon. I look as long as I can at the yellow-orange ball. Close my eyes and imagine sundogs to either side of its ghost-image. Something inviting, something beautiful to embrace these unwilling travellers.
When we get to the van, Twiggy ties my hands behind my back again with rope, opens the back doors. Hatchet Face moves to thrust me inside, but I tell him I can get in on my own. He backs up, clearly disappointed to have some of his ruffian duties pulled from him.
I wriggle inside with difficulty, gain my feet by propping my back against the shelves of electronics and pushing with my legs. Twiggy slams the doors shut. I kick my metal chair into position, plunk myself down on it.
Outside, rocket engines ignite.
We drive away. At one point, the van swings around so I get a decent view of one of the launches. Might be the shuttle my wife’s on. Might not be. Smoke billows under the fire of the rockets. Another one ignites. Even this far away, the sound is deafening.
I close my eyes. Sundogs dance behind my eyelids.
*
Back in the city, Hatchet Face and Twiggy drop me off at home. They do not say goodbye. They do not say anything at all. Twiggy cuts my rope and Hatchet Face shoves me in the back. They climb inside their van and drive off.
My socks are pooled around my ankles. My suit suffocates me. My own skin feels alien, more so than ever before. I want to cut it off my body, stretch it out on my lawn. Pin it down. Examine it. Determine how it came to be mine, who covered me in it. And why.
I look up. See tiny white ovals glittering against the light blue of the sky. Marching in single file.
Other people, curious about the noises coming from the desert, drift out onto their lawns in bathrobes, wiping sleep from their eyes.
Watching this cosmic funeral procession, my body burns inside. My chest crushed by millions of pounds of thrust. A feeling of weightlessness and lack of oxygen comes next. I look down but my feet are still planted firmly on the ground.
The shuttles move up in direct line of the sun. For a few moments, I can still make them out.
Then they disappear from sight.
I walk into my house, take a shower, and climb into my wife’s side of the bed.
*
In the morning, I check the newspapers, but Lennon was wrong. None of them mention last night’s march, nor the next night’s, nor any of the following ones that I watch from my bedroom window over the next three weeks.
But the people I saw at the party are gone. Never in the news. Never in the scandal sheets. When I look up their names online, I get no results. They do not now, nor have they ever, existed.
My socks pooling around my ankles does not bother me.
My suit fits me perfectly.
My skin feels natural on my body.
I have never been married.
The sun is the giver of life.