Get Blank (Fill in the Blank) (2 page)

Anyway, I reached into a gap between bottles, positive I was going to bring out something with a label that said, “Perfect Romantic Wine; Not Too Heavy or Pretentious; And Tell Me All About Your Day.” Instead I got a dusty bottle in one of those woven casks with a melted candle cork. It looked like the kind of thing Kiefer Sutherland would have given me to drink in an abandoned hotel while mulleted vampires girlishly skipped around me. While I was staring at it and wondering how the thing had found its way into a Vons, a grinding sound came from the shelves and they retracted to reveal a staircase down.

The aisle was empty. Just this yawning darkness, barely lit with guttering candles. Chanting sounds snaked up to me. The smells were just as culty, and I swear I could see cloaked and hooded figures moving through the firelight.

I put the wine back and picked up a local merlot.

Like I said, retired. I wasn’t going to get involved in a goddamn thing, no matter how much the universe seemed to want me to. I was going to hunker down and live a life I could describe to someone without a security clearance. But no. The Cosmic Trickster had other ideas.

God, he’s a dick.

It started the very next Tuesday, right as I was in the middle delivering of a civics lecture.

“There are actually four branches of government,” I said from my position on the step stool where I was alphabetizing the witchcraft section of my bookstore. “The executive, the legislative, the judicial, and the prejudicial.”

“Are you certain?” Khaali asked, her Somali accent making her sound so earnest.

“Only four they’re going to test you on,” I said. “The legislative makes the laws, the executive enacts the laws, the judicial interprets the laws, and the prejudicial ignores the laws. It’s a delicate system.” I peered at the shelf. “Are we out of the
De Vermis Mysteriis
again?”

Khaali leafed through her textbook. “I sold one to a man the other day.”

Couldn’t keep that one on the shelves. If I didn’t know better, I’d think there was a whole coven of witches in the area, but that was silly. They were out near Bakersfield. Good thing, too, since my store had the largest occult, history, and occult history section in the continental United States, not including Alaska (thanks a lot, Books, Sects, and Secret Masters of Anchorage).

“Prejudicial?” she asked again.

“Arguably the most important branch.”

 Khaali looked up from her citizenship exam like I was the crazy one here. “I don’t think that’s right,” she said.

 “What do you mean?”

“There’s no mention of a prejudicial branch anywhere.” She paged through her book as though to check one last time, just to be certain.

“They’re not going to come right out and say it. Defeats the whole purpose.”

She shook her head. “All right. What does the Constitution do?”

“Uh... let’s see. Defines the government and our basic rights as Americans. Provides loopholes for the Secret Masters. Oh, and determines hit point bonus per level.”

“That can’t be right.”

“Trust me. Come on, give me another.”

“How many Constitutional amendments are there?”

“Sixty-five.”

“It says twenty-seven here.”

I laughed. It came out a little nasally what with the bandage over my nose. Don’t worry—I had been beaten up by a book. “Right. Pull the other one.”

“Do you know
anything
about your country, Mr. Blank?”

That’s what she thought my name was. Robert Blank. It might as well be, legally speaking. I have a driver’s license under that name. A birth certificate and a library card, too. A membership to the local Elk’s Lodge and a card that says if I eat three more subs at Gaetano’s, I get the next one free. Amazon, Netflix, and Hotmail all know me by that name. Yeah, I even have an email that goes right to me, and it’s pretty easy to guess the username once you realize that I’d have to add numbers to the back half since just about everything is taken at this point. Besides, if I didn’t have one, how would I know about all these exciting new ways to increase my sexual potency?

Is it the name I was born with? Oh, hell no. I can barely remember that, and it’s not like anyone else is using it. My mother doesn’t talk so well anymore and who the hell knows where my father is. But for all intents and purposes it’s mine, and it’s the only name I use these days. And honestly, the only thing that made it truly part of me was having someone important to call me by it.

I used to have more names than anyone really needs. So many I lost track of them. Ask a Freemason and he’ll tell you I’m Colin Reznick. One of the ladies of V.E.N.U.S. would say Jonah Bailey. A Satanist would call me Sam Smiley, unless he’s the other kind of Satanist, in which case I’m Eli Simms. The ascetorexics over at the Anamadim Temple think I’m Ivan Cohen, and the Illuminati call me Daniel Isringhausen. They’re all real in that they each correspond to a flesh-and-blood person with a digital footprint and a paper spine. Each name has favorite haunts and Facebook accounts and a favorite video on YouTube of a puppy. They each have acquaintances, cronies, well-wishers, and contemporaries. They were as real as anyone else is in this world, and about a year ago they all died.

It was an unceremonious death, and there were no bodies. They joined that terrifyingly large number of people in the world who just up and vanish. Probably around six months ago, people who knew them began to realize the poor bastards weren’t coming back.

I left Los Angeles a year ago, leaving the names in a shallow grave. A figurative one, mind; the IDs were still as valid as they ever were. I didn’t update their various social networking pages, I stopped using their phones and their credit cards, and I abandoned the champion bar trivia team Hyperactive Crime Scene. I introduced myself as “Call me Bob,” and I cultivated a handshake that would make Roger Sterling proud.

I stepped down from the ladder. “Way too goddamn much, Miss Barre.”

Khaali Barre was a pleasant woman, and had been in the country for a little over five years. She didn’t opt for the easy green card marriage, which I admired. Instead, she decided to do things the hard way, by navigating American bureaucracy, which I didn’t admire. She was a good employee, though, and had driven me to the hospital when the
Necronomicon
decided to get revenge for all those midnight screenings of
Army of Darkness
I’d gone to. Had I known the actual hardcover book was directed by Sam Raimi, I might not have stocked it. I certainly wouldn’t have put it on the top shelf.

Mina had seen the falling book’s handiwork late Friday night when she finally got here. The actual accident had happened Thursday morning when some asshole from UCSB wanted to have a look at the thing. He must have gotten to the Lovecraft section in his 20th Century Lit class or, more likely, someone was running a
Cthulhu
LARP on campus and they’d heard about the local occult bookstore and its cranky proprietor.

The nice part of having a girlfriend—okay, not
the
nice part, because there are a ton of nice parts, and I’m enough of a grownup not to make a smutty joke here—is that when you hurt yourself, you get the sympathy affection. And Mina, even though she had just suffered through literally hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 101, made the ouchy face and gave me a hug that turned into a kiss. And believe me, that was worth her hitting the bandage accidentally.

So yeah, a year later and Mina Duplessis and I are together. I’m still puzzling over that one. I’ve pointed out that she can do better, but she never takes me seriously. There’s the obvious: she’s a beautiful woman, and I mean professionally so. She’s a model, a plus-sized one, who generally gets the call whenever a designer wants a classic old-Hollywood look. More importantly, she’s smart as a whip and funny as hell when she wants to be. I’m just in the business of making sure that whatever reasons she had for hooking up with me remain true. She tells me I have nothing to worry about, but I didn’t spend a decade being paranoid for nothing. No thanks, I’ll keep making date night something fun.

Granted, there have been a few changes here and there, and if you ask me, for the better. Mina has me dressing a little better. The woman knows clothes. She knows a lot of things in point of fact, but like I said, she’s a model, so the clothes part makes sense. And because she’s a plus-sized model, she’s also used to working with what someone’s got rather than trying to simulate something they don’t. She’s got me in guayaberas and the occasional bowling shirt. Slacks, too, although she’s nice enough to get me the ones that don’t need to be ironed. She briefly tried to get me in something other than my Chuck Taylors, but I put the brakes on that right quick. Still, she says it gives me a laid-back island look. I have to be attractive to exactly one person in the world, so as long as Mina likes it, so do I.

The biggest hit to my identity, the part separating He-of-a-Thousand-Names and Robert Blank of the California central coast, was when she made me cut the Reagan hair. The haircut that had been my unofficial trademark, the ’do that ushered me into countless ultra-right wing hearts is gone. It’s not like I need it anymore. I don’t need to get the masters of the world to trust me, so there’s no real point in looking like a repurposed Big Boy anymore. Occasionally I miss it, since there really was an art to getting the swirl exactly right, and doing so was the closest I ever got to meditation. But truth be told, I look better now.

The giant duckbilled bandage on my face wasn’t part of the fashion makeover, but it’d be gone in a little bit and I could go back to smelling something that wasn’t my own dried blood. Kind of funny that I’d made it through an entire noir murder mystery with my sniffer intact, only to take a book to the face during my premature retirement. Somewhere, the Cosmic Trickster is laughing.

“I don’t want to offend you,” Khaali said from her place behind the counter, civics book in her lap, “but I think I should probably study on my own.”

I shrugged. “If you want. I think we have a couple good civics texts in the back.”

“In the Conspiracies section?”

“Yep, those are them.”

She chewed her lip. “I think I’ll keep with the one Immigration recommended.”

“Your lo—” My ringtone cut me off. It was the riff from Boston’s “Peace of Mind,” the only Boston I was getting these days. I checked it. Mina Duplessis calling.

I answered it. “Sheinhardt Wig Comp—”

“Rabbit.” That was Mina’s nickname for me, something she picked even before I had a “real” name. .“I need your help.” Her voice was tense, scared. Normally it’s incongruously soft, probably something she affected around the time genetics turned her into the avalanche of beauty she had become. Now, the blade in her words cut through any joke I might have made.

“What’s going on?”

“I’ve been arrested. They say I killed somebody!”

 Goddamn it. I guess I’m not retired after all.

TOOK ME A SECOND TO RECOVER MY POWER OF SPEECH.
Mina was no shrinking violet and, sure, she’d been known to counter even casual sexism with a bit of light crotch soccer, but she’d never kill anyone.

“What?”

“The cops. They have evidence. They didn’t even bother to question me, not really. They just arrested me as soon as I got home from your place. They’re holding me without bail, they said.”

“Don’t worry, Mina. I’ll be right there.”

“What should I do? I’ve never been arrested before.”

 “Just sit tight and don’t say anything. I’ll get you a lawyer. He’s a little weird, but trust me, he’s gotten me out of some shit before.”

I could tell she was trying not to cry, and I really wished there was some hugging technology I could deploy through the phone that wouldn’t be terrifying. “I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t even know this guy, and they’re saying we were sleeping together.”

“I know. It’s probably just a misunderstanding,” I said, trying to speak in the soothing tones of late night call-in radio. I was really thinking that this sounded like a frame job, but I wasn’t going to say that. Not making Mina cry was one of my primary purposes on this earth. “Did they give you a name? The guy they think you killed?”

“Um... Neil Greene, I think? I’ve never heard of him before.”

I had. Neil Greene was a Seventeenth Degree Freemason, a government bureaucrat for the city of Los Angeles who controlled roughly 1/17th of the flow of paperwork that kept the city running, and through that, about the same fraction of the city itself. Plus he was a member in good standing of the First Reformed Church of the Antichrist. He was also a friend of mine, or as close to those as I got. Literally the last thing I had ever seen him do was attempt to save my life. In my head, I briefly went over the pros and cons of telling Mina.

“I know him,” I said. “Knew him, I mean. Look, this changes nothing.
You
didn’t know him and you sure as hell didn’t kill him. I’m driving down now, all right? We’ll have this all straightened out before dinner.”

She exhaled and I pictured her gathering herself. She was a strong person, and like most strong people, she was not a fan of being in situations that were out of control. “Okay,” she said, then repeated it. “Okay. I’ll see you soon.”

I was on the road pretty much immediately. I told Khaali that I had to go, glossing over exactly why, and asked her to close. She wanted to know what was wrong, but it would probably take too long to explain. I almost headed out with nothing but the shirt on my back, but something made me hold off. A little voice whispering that maybe, just maybe, this was a little more sinister than it appeared—and it already looked sinister enough to be twirling a mustache while it tied Mina to some train tracks. That I should be prepared for another bout of insanity courtesy of my long association with the Information Underground.

I was retired, right, but I could unretire for a day. This could be like Michael Jordan with the Wizards, if Michael Jordan had never been very good at basketball. No, no problem, this was even less than that. I wasn’t deluding myself. I wasn’t trying to come back for good. I was going to do one thing and get out before anyone knew I was there. Get back to the City of Angels, Casablanca for the Secret Masters of the world, the city where shit gets done, where shadow governments can meet and hash out their differences over sushi and cocaine. And here comes Peter Lorre, the Boy Friday for every last one of these groups.