21
Gary Lee Vickers has run out of space to hide. All the condos have been sold. Every condo has been moved into, except for one last unit.
Unit 96.
If he’s still here, and I suspect he is, I know where to find him.
I slot the key into Unit 96 very slowly.
I don’t close the door behind me, leave it wide open, in case Vickers has a weapon.
I make my way around the completed condo, through furniture-empty rooms.
In the upstairs hallway, I pull the cord that unlatches the attic staircase from the ceiling.
“Vickers?” I call out. “Gary Lee Vickers?”
No answer from the dark attic.
“I’m the security guard here. I know you sleep here. You know that I know you sleep here. And I never reported you, so you know it’s safe to come out now.”
“Mike Miller,” I hear Vickers say from that darkness. “The guard for the evening.”
I hear him laugh a little.
I’m startled that he has my name, so I fight my better instinct to retreat fast.
I’m not sure I want to actually meet him or see his disfigured face up close, so I say, “All the condos are sold. You’re gonna need to find a new place to squat. Just a warning.”
I hear the attic floorboard start to creak.
It’s that sound that lets me know that of all the things I’ve been disillusioned about here, the presence of Gary Lee Vickers is real.
As he takes backward steps down the attic staircase, I brace myself for his murderous threat.
We face each other. He’s beyond ugly, botched by cheap surgery.
He says, “So you never reported me. Why is that?”
“You were here before me,” I say. “By the time I realized you were here, I had already fallen in love with this place. I could sit on my ass without complaint. You left me undisturbed.”
“It is time for me to move along,” he says. “You’re right about that. I’m sure I’ll find another construction site to squat in. But finding a guard who doesn’t squeal, I won’t be a fool to expect that much. I was lucky to have you.”
“You did nothing wrong here, I far as I can see.”
“No, I didn’t. And that’s the point. Well, maybe a few bad things. I made a copy of your keys to get into some condos, to take showers and, you know, raid refrigerators for food.”
“Nobody ever said anything to me about stolen food.”
“Only took enough to survive.”
“Wait, made copies of my keys, how?”
“You were blackout drunk a few times. I snatched it off your hip. But I returned them before you got back to your senses.”
“Anything else I should know of? Anything else bad?”
“Well. Maybe some other things.”
“What happened?”
“Some nights I’d get a little worn down with nothing to do, so I’d peep into condos. I’d watch the people watching news coverage of my prison escape. It’s a strange thing to watch other people watching.”
Inwardly, I’m remembering how I did the same thing once, watching some of the neighbors watch a talent show on TV. Remembering that sad blue glow on their faces.
“Hey, buddy,” he jolts me back from the memory. “Who watches the watchman?”
“You do, apparently.”
Gary Lee Vickers, with his missing nose and his sagging eye and twisted lips, says to me, “You’re a good guy, Mike Miller. You’re a bit crazy at times, but you always keep some normal logic going in that crazy brain of yours. Hey, thanks for keeping a lookout. Hey, I should get going. Hey, do me a favor. One day they’ll catch me, send me back to death row. I thought for some time I might shoot it out with the cops if it ever came to that. But being here for a while, in a nice neighborhood, not killing anyone, I’ve kinda lost a little of my grisly aggression. When they catch me, do me a favor. Tell people I’m not as bad as they think, huh? Might spare me the electric chair.”
I have no other option but to agree. Anyway, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to hype the other side of his harmless ying-yang personality.
In truth, right now, I have other concerns, more stress. Since the construction is done, where will I work next?
Gary Lee Vickers gathers his pillow from the attic, along with a pair of oversized sneakers. I wait for him while he laces them up.
Then he says, “Climbed up a deck here one time, looked into a bedroom window, looked in on a man with some kind of helmet strapped across his face, like a helmet for the future. Whatchu call it, virtual? So I got jealous. It’s the kinda thing I’ll miss out on when I go back to prison. So I snuck in, undid his shoelaces, stole the sneakers right off his feet.”
I have to ask, “He never felt you pull them off?”
“Oh, man. He was lost in some kind of la-la land. Never felt but a tickle. You see, it’s just that type of fun experience I won’t get in lock-up. Magical worlds. Hey, man, it’s been fun, but I can tell by the look in your eyes you’re disgusted with my hacked up face, so I’ll save you any more sight of it. Hey, you know what I’m gonna miss the most here, besides those hotdogs from the food cart?”
“What?”
“That porcelain elephant collection in one of them condos. Such a sweet collection. Made my ass feel right at home.”
I drift off for a moment. I recall how those white elephants rained down from the sky, how they shattered on the highway the day this whole neighborhood exploded.
When I come back from that vision in mind, Gary Lee Vickers is gone.
I suppose it’s good he had to sneak away so quickly.
And I figure it best we go different ways. His guilt-by-association was beginning to creep up on me.
Although, I must say, there is a part of our conversation that almost gets lost, that remains unspoken.
I go outside, down by the lake to retrieve that lost conversation. It is something that went unspoken between us. It is something I registered only in my subconscious, as a dark vibe. His dark vibe. That strange missing part of our conversation, I find it at the lapping edge of lake water.
What Gary Lee Vickers, mass murderer, had only suggested, was this:
“All these nice people here, there isn’t one of them I couldn’t kill with a flick of my wrist. The toughest one here, I wasn’t but fifteen moves to his mind. And when I got there, I’d give him fifteen blows to the back of his skull with an ice pick. But I didn’t. And that’s the point. So remember this, it’s always better on the outside.”
The words of this non-verbal part of our conversation carry over the lake like a thin vapor.
I keep staring out from this dark waterfront, into that mist.
I feel chills on my flesh, rippling cold.
Not much longer after, I see a shadowy object approaching in the distance. It skims over the lake surface. I rub the dark night out of my eyes.
It’s a man. In a canoe.
He paddles slowly. The canoe glides toward me.
The canoe scuffs the sand of the shoreline.
I recognize the man but not his name. I can’t believe I remember him. He’s the mailman who got fired from his job a year ago because the internet stole it from him. If I remember right, he had a noose that I can still picture as knotted. I’m sure that day he meant to kill himself by hanging from it.
He reminds me again, his name is Gerald Jerome.
He tells me he did plan to commit suicide that day, but while he dangled from a tree branch, about to die, a group of half-naked people ran through the forest to lift him up, re-deliver oxygen to his brain. He says now he camps in the woods with those same half-naked people. A commune, he calls it. But he hints there is more to this group, a purpose they all live for, possibly bent on some anti-tech mindset. He invites me to join their environment friendly movement. To come . . . live with them.
Neo-luddite.
Eco-terrorism.
S.A.N.E
Stand Against Networked Environments
Gerald Jerome tells me I’ll have to quit drugs, since our motivation will be to stay grounded in reality, to be true to ourselves. He asks me to accept that personal challenge. To stop all my escapism.
I ask this jobless guy for a few minutes to decide. I walk back up the paved incline to the condo unit where I last saw Vickers. The last empty unsold condo. This is a place I never wanted to leave. Now, this is a place I will return to only in my mind, as a memory.
I tell the lights by voice command to switch on. I imagine there’s a table in the kitchen. I imagine it with such force of thought until it lay ready with dinner plates.
There I sit. Waiting for my guests.
Their delay, I attribute to a 3D printer getting jammed up with carbon nanotubes. Their lateness, I blame on the toughest material known to exist in nature. Worse than that old excuse, stuck in traffic, this type of elevator-to-space material causes my guests to miss dinner at six.
The automatic oven has been cooking the spiced-up lamb for three hours already. I can smell it, almost taste it.
My dinner guests, the six of them, are supposed to be as follows: a friend, a lover, a former-lover, a business partner, a family member, and a charity accepting stranger. But none of them show. The invitations must’ve got lost in the mail. So the dinner party never starts.
Instead, the automatic oven starts to smoke. The lamb starts to burn. Then, I think, it starts to rain inside the condo. But really it’s just the sprinkler system.
The sprinkler system, I now realize, is just some tears I’d have one day when I fully miss this place. No more face-to-face with the Clear Lake Condo Estate.
I find myself running out, away from that condo, leaving the lights behind me on. A war begins. A third world war, everyone in the digital trenches.
When an American soldier finds a prisoner of war, he’ll test that POW with American movie trivia, just to see if he’s really American, not a terrorist. He’ll say, “Who was at the dinner party in that movie, Six at Six? And with a smile of gratitude at being rescued, the POW will say, “It’s a trick question. Nobody. Just the host. Divide and conquer. Leaving just one. Lights on, but nobody home. A split between the real world and the virtual. Such a legendary divorce. Cult-classic. So good to see you, bro, you don’t even know.”
The burnt lamb back there gives me an idea. I’m done eating meat, now a fruit and vegetable man. But it also gives me another idea. Burn things. Using toilet paper from the portable toilet, I create something of a short wick, to be stuffed into the gas tank of my monster truck. Then I light the thing, that atmosphere killing gas hog.
Before anything explodes, I meet the shadow of a figure, Gerald Jerome, down by the lake, under the moon. I bring my decision.
I catch myself watching myself, detached from the action, as I step inside the canoe.
It’s always better on the outside.
As Gerald Jerome pushes off the land with his paddle, we sail across, a boat through the digital mist. Tiny squares of floating gray, shifting layers of lighter and darker squares of gray.
I can feel myself breath the misty air in, gaining a second life wind.
These are my episodes. Episodes in digital conquest.
These are my dispatches, sent from the cold front.