Upgunned (11 page)

I don't wish to sound like a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist. But Clavius told me that the surge in liquid crystal and plasma monitors was encouraged by our hidden overseers because each new screen had the built-in capacity to passively watch and listen back at the will of some faraway keyboard jock. It was exactly like the TV that watches you from Orwell's
1984
, but generations more subtle because it did not matter if the unit was on or off; now reconsider that S
TANDBY
light that always glows. I don't know how true the story is, but ask yourself if you think it is
really
that far-fetched.

If you don't believe, you might change your mind if you had met Gun Guy and his pal Mister Kimber. They were supposed to be untouchable but I had managed a limp form of fight-back. A hidden dead-switch bomb.

Nobody was more shocked than me when it blew up.

*   *   *

Tripp Bergin called the next day to pester me about the movie gig. I told him I was in a transitional phase and would get back to him.

Joey, my assistant and facilitator, had been MIA all morning, probably snoring off an Ecstasy binge and subsequent water bloat, after having left my loft for a club that did not open until midnight.

Nasja called twice. I erased her messages without listening to them. I already knew she would be hectoring me to see photos too soon. Or worse.

Clavius showed up around sunset. Himself, in person.

Which was not usual. This was no rare in-the-flesh visit to cement our bond, or a publicity op, because no media were lurking. He either had a grand new scheme to hatch that mandated my labor … or something was seriously wrong.

His limpid eyes scanned the loft with approval. He'd gotten none less than DeMarco—yes,
the
DeMarco—to redesign the living space with a bias toward photography—a lot of glass, flat angles, minimalist work zones and polished wood, yet practical for the sprawl a large shoot can prompt.

“You've done well for yourself,” he said. He should know: he picked out most of this stuff himself, or his creatures had. I had become a spinoff of him.

“I've also done well for yourself,” I said, uncertain of his tone. Was he angry at me for Char? For Nasja? For an unspecified sin, as the parent who smacks the kid upside the noggin and when the kid yowls, “What'd I do?” the parent says, “You should know.”

Clavius seemed calm and ready to be distracted. I already knew this was his war face.

“Char,” he said simply. No adjectives, no qualifiers. It was his way to drop a topic like a rock into a koi pond and let others handle the splashing and ripples.

It was also a relief that I didn't have to inchworm my way toward the subject. I dove right in: “She's been moving her stuff out for weeks. I just realized that this morning. I'm not mad at you … well, maybe a little.”

Clavius waved that off; a trifle. “She's staying at HawkNest, you know.”

HawkNest was Clavius's elaborate penthouse-style New York pied-à-terre. He owned the entire twenty-sixth floor of a building on the Upper West Side. In most places, Clavius liked to be up high and on top. Quite a few people could be said to be “in residence” there at any given time—models, guests, celebrities holing up incognito, assorted grotesques. Clavius had an entire wing of apartments for visitors. That way, women from all over the planet could stay there, yet none could claim they were actually
sleeping
with Clavius.

From what Nasja had divulged, Clavius rarely had sex conventionally, which was just too boring. There was a ritualistic introductory phase where he might call upon five acolyte women to each perform different aspects of a single erotic collage. Like A-B-C: Abby does a hand job designed to last an hour, then Barbara replaces her for an anal penetration of one single thrust, then Cathy rotates in for other kinds of stimulation like climax hovering, Doris arrives for vigorous fornication and a precisely timed number of ins-and-outs, and finally Elsey dashes in to swallow the flow of genetic material.

To mess with the orchestration of Clavius's labyrinthine sexual scenarios was to squander spiritual energy like some brutish, low commoner. Why, that would just be
fucking.

I had no idea what part or role Char played in all that. I only knew she had left me when we seemed evenly matched, sexually, spiritually, and in terms of knowing the same puns and finishing each other's sentences. Her departure did not confirm anything except my single status, because if you were a total boor and lost it and screamed at Clavius, “Are you fucking her?” He would smile and answer, “Yes, I am fucking her emotions.”

“No, goddammit—are you having sex with her?” He'd say, “Some might call it sex.” And so on, same as the child-whacking parent.

Which was why Clavius had noted that Char was now at HawkNest.

“She's flown across the country already?” I said, a bit stung by her haste.

Clavius ran his hands through his indestructible iron hair and steepled his fingers. “Yes—this morning. Where is the
Targets
picture that was hanging there? Did you sell it?”

“So to speak,” I said. “Is this about Nasja?”

Another wave. “Do with Nasja what you will. She has citizenship and a bank balance; I'm done with her.”

I tried to stay as honestly on track as I could, even if it seemed coarse: “Is Char her replacement?”

“Not at all,” he said. “What makes you think that?” It was the sort of question only Clavius could ask and get away with.

Then a teeny lightbulb zapped on, somewhere, and he added, “Let me tell you a little something about our dear friend Charlene. Do you remember when you met her? Back when you were still moonlighting at that droll print shop?”

I nodded and Clavius indicated that he would deign to imbibe a sparkling water of the appropriate brand.

“Do you remember your mind-set then, what you were thinking?”

“I was thinking I was really lucky to have met you,” I said.

“Yes—fortuitous. Profitable for all. But you thought of yourself as an underdog, and still do in many ways. You hated feeling beholden. Char was the answer to that emotional stress.”

“Yeah, that's how I felt at the time.”

“No—you mistake my meaning. Char was
my
solution to your distress.”

“No.” I could not backtrack it. Char and I had met at a book signing that had nothing to do with Clavius. She acted as though she had never heard of him except in a distant, peripheral way. But she had never said it outright, in so many words.

“It was simple to follow you outside my purview,” Clavius said. “I aimed her at you and she accomplished her task, which was to bring you out of yourself. Look at how your work has matured and flourished.”

My vision began to spot and plunge again.

“She has simply flown home, you see? Now I can explain it to you, safely and without guilt or rage or reactionary hostility. Do you agree?”

I sat down rather heavily, sloshing my drink.

Char had been a plant. Even for her, I owed Clavius.

*   *   *

I tried to tell Clavius the story of what had happened to me. I had no other confidants at hand. He found it amusing.

“That's a fantastic confluence of nanochance,” he observed with a twinkle. “The hairsbreadth timing, the implied derring-do. Are you thinking of making this a series?”

“I didn't make it up,” I said. I showed him Nasja's tape. He was less than convinced. I was right—without the photos, the tape meant nothing, and I didn't have the photos.

“Is it the assignments?” Clavius asked. He moved to the stainless bar sink near the kitchen island to wash his hands, which he did thirty or forty times per day. “Are they becoming tedium for you? The magazine layouts? Tell me what you want.”

He was asking if I had snapped into fantasyland because my daily workload was so mind-numbing, and offering deeper debt.

“We can easily alter that,” he said with the surety of a man who always gets what he wants. “You've been my champion. I don't wish to see you unhappy.”

Really? Then work some sorcery on Char so she never met you.

I was being petty and cranky, resenting the control held by people more powerful than me. Same as with Gun Guy. If I would just face my low position on the totem pole, the food chain, I would at least enjoy the refreshment of an honest panoramic look at how my life sucked.

Yeah, I spent most days sobbing over my unfair lot: I had an upward-bound profile, a killer portfolio, a million-dollar crib, the freedom of determining my own hours, a Jaguar, enough stray dollars to feed my antique camera fetish, a chorus line of lovelies, and an all-access pass to realms a TV watcher can only dream about—all the stuff I had idealized before Clavius walked into New World Inkworks that first time. Yeah, yeah, my life was a bitch.

“If little Nasja fails to divert you,” Clavius said, “then Aja had indicated an attraction. You know Aja—the Norwegian?”

This was getting worse and worse. Even the
names
on the sex parade were starting to blur into one another. Aja. Amanda. Natalia. Nastasia.

“I need to fuck my work right now,” I said and instantly regretted it.

“Quite. I think you've already sensed that Nasja is a dead end. Bought Russians have few desirable qualities beyond the initial attraction; they're just too mercenary. One can't blame them but one does not have to let them bulldoze you, either. Remember our friend Hofmeister, the fellow with the gallery? Lately he's gone for mute Koreans, purchased through Chinese brokers. I find them so thankful and servile that they're amazingly dull. But they were a godsend for Chinese men, and we in the West are only just catching the cultural coattail.”

He paused to see if he still had my attention. True, my mind was on the wander due to larger and more pressing events. He held up a finger, ever the calm academician. “This does have a point,” he said, “and it relates to your feelings about Nasja and Char in regard to my participation.”

“Sorry.” I said that too much, to nearly everyone.

“Bear with,” Clavius said. “Chinese cultural preference and dogma has always held that female children were undesirable. The one-child-per-couple mandate only made the situation more heinous. Where before, female children were simply abandoned, now they could be aborted if ultrasound revealed them to be the wrong sex. As a result, available Chinese men began to outnumber available—that is, marriageable—Chinese women. Bond slavery was the result. The border between China and North Korean became what they call a ‘wife market.' Female Korean refugees fled their economic distress by seeking Chinese husbands. One out of every three was fated to be sold by Chinese gangsters, if they were not collected by the even more predatory gangs of ‘wife hunters.' The good ones cost less than $2000. They receive the birth statistics of a dead person. The Chinese men, who would never admit to having ‘bought' a wife, in return get someone especially pliable, hard-working, and most important of all, submissive. And everyone makes out along the way—border guards, identity brokers, all the needed intermediaries. Many of these people also thrive within the adoption sector. Business is booming, and bureaucracy charges by the hour. Serving up Chinese babies for foreign adoption has become an industry, and an irresistible windfall if you happen to be stuck with a female child you couldn't otherwise give away.”

You may have noticed the cost of having Clavius's mostly undivided attention: Every question is the start of an opera.

“The point being—?” I asked.

“Just this: what I do for the women who come under my umbrella, so to speak, is not bond slavery, nor indentured servitude, nor blackmail. Nor is it the addiction-and-prostitution paradigm. Nasja and Char and all the others like them do what they do voluntarily, and are free to leave anytime they choose. I'm not some kind of black-hearted puppet master, pulling internecine strings to make your life a living hell. I just want to help people. I cannot save the world, but I can choose those I wish to help.”

You may have noticed Clavius's ego is one of the few things larger than his bank account.

“Fair enough,” I said. But it was not fair at all. What Clavius had, the rest of the world lusted for. Between that and capitalism was a lot of wiggle room.

To be honest, how could I really blame Clavius for any of this? He had marched right over and told the truth. I think.

I pressed him on the matter of the photos and video. He did not seem too hooked.

“Frankly, I don't spend a great deal of time online,” he said. “It's too frustrating. All that advertising.”

We shared the same pain. When I said I “uploaded the video,” that was the short version of the story. It was more like three hours of keyboard-punching and teeth-gnashing. Unless one had the latest computer—and yours is outmoded by the time it leaves the factory—navigating the nation formerly known as the World Wide Web was an exercise in sheer self-abuse. Simple pages took ages to load because they were piggybacked onto advertising. Nine times out of ten, the “apps ‘n' feeds” incorporated a video, animation, or god knows what to bog down the load time. On my computer this molasses-retardation frequently prompted a browser crash. Start again. Then the load times for what you wished to disseminate threatened to overflow the cup again. Pop-ups were scotched only to be replaced by sneakier pop-ups that circumvented the filter while tons of attached spam sniffed for your in-box. Start again. Ad clicks, widgets, and error messages sucked up entire minutes until they forced another restart. Repeat as needed until you're in a padded cell.

“Dude, just get a new computer,” my fireball Joey would advise. I admit I murdered my first one by punching it off the desk. After that I tended to keep them until they died from their own obsolescence. With Joey, the concept of upgrade was an urgent minute-to-minute reality. He could probably do more with his phone—“mobile device”—than I could with all the devices in my home.